ALSO BY ADAM GRANT
Give and Take
Originals
Option B
VIKING
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- Names: Grant, Adam M., author.
Title: Think again : the power of knowing what you don’t know / Adam Grant.
Description: [New York, New York] : Viking, [2021] | Includes bibliographical references
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Identifiers: LCCN 2020035237 (print) | LCCN 2020035238 (ebook) | ISBN 9781984878106
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Subjects: LCSH: Thought and thinking. | Questioning. | Knowledge, Theory of. | Belief and
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pid_prh_5.6.1_c0_r0
To Kaan, Jeremy, and Bill,
My three oldest friends—one thing I won’t rethink
CONTENTS
Prologue
PART I. Individual Rethinking
Updating Our Own Views
1. A Preacher, a Prosecutor, a Politician, and a Scientist Walk into Your Mind
2. The Armchair Quarterback and the Impostor: Finding the Sweet Spot of Confidence
3. The Joy of Being Wrong: The Thrill of Not Believing Everything You Think
4. The Good Fight Club: The Psychology of Constructive Conflict
PART II. Interpersonal Rethinking
Opening Other People’s Minds
5. Dances with Foes: How to Win Debates and Influence People
6. Bad Blood on the Diamond: Diminishing Prejudice by Destabilizing Stereotypes
7. Vaccine Whisperers and Mild-Mannered Interrogators: How the Right Kind of
Listening Motivates People to Change
PART III. Collective Rethinking
Creating Communities of Lifelong Learners
8. Charged Conversations: Depolarizing Our Divided Discussions
9. Rewriting the Textbook: Teaching Students to Question Knowledge
10. That’s Not the Way We’ve Always Done It: Building Cultures of Learning at Work
PART IV. Conclusion
11. Escaping Tunnel Vision: Reconsidering Our Best-Laid Career and Life Plans
Epilogue
Actions for Impact
Acknowledgments
Notes
Illustration Credits
Index
Prologue
A
fter a bumpy flight, fifteen men dropped from the Montana
sky. They weren’t skydivers. They were smokejumpers: elite
wildland firefighters parachuting in to extinguish a forest fire
started by lightning the day before. In a matter of minutes, they
would be racing for their lives.
The smokejumpers landed near the top of Mann Gulch late on a
scorching August afternoon in 1949. With the fire visible across the
gulch, they made their way down the slope toward the Missouri
River. Their plan was to dig a line in the soil around the fire to
contain it and direct it toward an area where there wasn’t much to
burn.
After hiking about a quarter mile, the foreman, Wagner Dodge,
saw that the fire had leapt across the gulch and was heading straight
at them. The flames stretched as high as 30 feet in the air. Soon the
fire would be blazing fast enough to cross the length of two football
fields in less than a minute.
By 5:45 p.m. it was clear that even containing the fire was off the
table. Realizing it was time to shift gears from fight to flight, Dodge
immediately turned the crew around to run back up the slope. The
smokejumpers had to bolt up an extremely steep incline, through
knee-high grass on rocky terrain. Over the next eight minutes they
traveled nearly 500 yards, leaving the top of the ridge less than 200
yards away.
With safety in sight but the fire swiftly advancing, Dodge did
something that baffled his crew. Instead of trying to outrun the fire,
he stopped and bent over. He took out a matchbook, started lighting
matches, and threw them into the grass. “We thought he must have
gone nuts,” one later recalled. “With the fire almost on our back,
what the hell is the boss doing lighting another fire in front of us?”
He thought to himself: That bastard Dodge is trying to burn me to
death. It’s no surprise that the crew didn’t follow Dodge when he
waved his arms toward his fire and yelled, “Up! Up this way!”
What the smokejumpers didn’t realize was that Dodge had
devised a survival strategy: he was building an escape fire. By
burning the grass ahead of him, he cleared the area of fuel for the
wildfire to feed on. He then poured water from his canteen onto his
handkerchief, covered his mouth with it, and lay facedown in the
charred area for the next fifteen minutes. As the wildfire raged
directly above him, he survived in the oxygen close to the ground.
Tragically, twelve of the smokejumpers perished. A pocket watch
belonging to one of the victims was later found with the hands
melted at 5:56 p.m.
Why did only three of the smokejumpers survive? Physical
fitness might have been a factor; the other two survivors managed to
outrun the fire and reach the crest of the ridge. But Dodge prevailed
because of his mental fitness.
on what it takes to be mentally fit, the first
idea that comes to mind is usually intelligence. The smarter you are,
the more complex the problems you can solve—and the faster you
can solve them. Intelligence is traditionally viewed as the ability to
think and learn. Yet in a turbulent world, there’s another set of
cognitive skills that might matter more: the ability to rethink and
unlearn.
Imagine that you’ve just finished taking a multiple-choice test,
and you start to second-guess one of your answers. You have some
extra time—should you stick with your first instinct or change it?
About three quarters of students are convinced that revising
their answer will hurt their score. Kaplan, the big test-prep company,
once warned students to “exercise great caution if you decide to
change an answer. Experience indicates that many students who
change answers change to the wrong answer.”
With all due respect to the lessons of experience, I prefer the
rigor of evidence. When a trio of psychologists conducted a
comprehensive review of thirty-three studies, they found that in
every one, the majority of answer revisions were from wrong to right.
This phenomenon is known as the first-instinct fallacy.
In one demonstration, psychologists counted eraser marks on
the exams of more than 1,500 students in Illinois. Only a quarter of
the changes were from right to wrong, while half were from wrong to
right. I’ve seen it in my own classroom year after year: my students’
final exams have surprisingly few eraser marks, but those who do
rethink their first answers rather than staying anchored to them end
up improving their scores.
Of course, it’s possible that second answers aren’t inherently
better; they’re only better because students are generally so reluctant
to switch that they only make changes when they’re fairly confident.
But recent studies point to a different explanation: it’s not so much
changing your answer that improves your score as considering
whether you should change it.
We don’t just hesitate to rethink our answers. We hesitate at the
very idea of rethinking. Take an experiment where hundreds of
college students were randomly assigned to learn about the firstinstinct fallacy. The speaker taught them about the value of changing
their minds and gave them advice about when it made sense to do so.
On their next two tests, they still weren’t any more likely to revise
their answers.
Part of the problem is cognitive laziness. Some psychologists
point out that we’re mental misers: we often prefer the ease of
hanging on to old views over the difficulty of grappling with new
ones. Yet there are also deeper forces behind our resistance to
rethinking. Questioning ourselves makes the world more
unpredictable. It requires us to admit that the facts may have
changed, that what was once right may now be wrong. Reconsidering
something we believe deeply can threaten our identities, making it
feel as if we’re losing a part of ourselves.
Rethinking isn’t a struggle in every part of our lives. When it
comes to our possessions, we update with fervor. We refresh our
wardrobes when they go out of style and renovate our kitchens when
they’re no longer in vogue. When it comes to our knowledge and
opinions, though, we tend to stick to our guns. Psychologists call this
seizing and freezing. We favor the comfort of conviction over the
discomfort of doubt, and we let our beliefs get brittle long before our
bones. We laugh at people who still use Windows 95, yet we still cling
to opinions that we formed in 1995. We listen to views that make us
feel good, instead of ideas that make us think hard.
At some point, you’ve probably heard that if you drop a frog in a
pot of scalding hot water, it will immediately leap out. But if you
drop the frog in lukewarm water and gradually raise the
temperature, the frog will die. It lacks the ability to rethink the
situation, and doesn’t realize the threat until it’s too late.
I did some research on this popular story recently and
discovered a wrinkle: it isn’t true.
Tossed into the scalding pot, the frog will get burned badly and
may or may not escape. The frog is actually better off in the slowboiling pot: it will leap out as soon as the water starts to get
uncomfortably warm.
It’s not the frogs who fail to reevaluate. It’s us. Once we hear the
story and accept it as true, we rarely bother to question it.
raced toward them, the smokejumpers
had a decision to make. In an ideal world, they would have had
enough time to pause, analyze the situation, and evaluate their
options. With the fire raging less than 100 yards behind, there was
no chance to stop and think. “On a big fire there is no time and no
tree under whose shade the boss and the crew can sit and have a
Platonic dialogue about a blowup,” scholar and former firefighter
Norman Maclean wrote in Young Men and Fire, his award-winning
chronicle of the disaster. “If Socrates had been foreman on the Mann
Gulch fire, he and his crew would have been cremated while they
were sitting there considering it.”
Dodge didn’t survive as a result of thinking slower. He made it
out alive thanks to his ability to rethink the situation faster. Twelve
smokejumpers paid the ultimate price because Dodge’s behavior
didn’t make sense to them. They couldn’t rethink their assumptions
in time.
Under acute stress, people typically revert to their automatic,
well-learned responses. That’s evolutionarily adaptive—as long as
you find yourself in the same kind of environment in which those
reactions were necessary. If you’re a smokejumper, your well-learned
response is to put out a fire, not start another one. If you’re fleeing
for your life, your well-learned response is to run away from the fire,
not toward it. In normal circumstances, those instincts might save
your life. Dodge survived Mann Gulch because he swiftly overrode
both of those responses.
No one had taught Dodge to build an escape fire. He hadn’t even
heard of the concept; it was pure improvisation. Later, the other two
survivors testified under oath that nothing resembling an escape fire
was covered in their training. Many experts had spent their entire
careers studying wildfires without realizing it was possible to stay
alive by burning a hole through the blaze.
When I tell people about Dodge’s escape, they usually marvel at
his resourcefulness under pressure. That was genius! Their
astonishment quickly melts into dejection as they conclude that this
kind of eureka moment is out of reach for mere mortals. I got
stumped by my fourth grader’s math homework. Yet most acts of
rethinking don’t require any special skill or ingenuity.
Moments earlier at Mann Gulch, the smokejumpers missed
another opportunity to think again—and that one was right at their
fingertips. Just before Dodge started tossing matches into the grass,
he ordered his crew to drop their heavy equipment. They had spent
the past eight minutes racing uphill while still carrying axes, saws,
shovels, and 20-pound packs.
If you’re running for your life, it might seem obvious that your
first move would be to drop anything that might slow you down. For
firefighters, though, tools are essential to doing their jobs. Carrying
and taking care of equipment is deeply ingrained in their training
and experience. It wasn’t until Dodge gave his order that most of the
smokejumpers set down their tools—and even then, one firefighter
hung on to his shovel until a colleague took it out of his hands. If the
crew had abandoned their tools sooner, would it have been enough to
save them?
We’ll never know for certain, but Mann Gulch wasn’t an isolated
incident. Between 1990 and 1995 alone, a total of twenty-three
wildland firefighters perished trying to outrace fires uphill even
though dropping their heavy equipment could have made the
difference between life and death. In 1994, on Storm King Mountain
in Colorado, high winds caused a fire to explode across a gulch.
Running uphill on rocky ground with safety in view just 200 feet
away, fourteen smokejumpers and wildland firefighters—four
women, ten men—lost their lives.
Later, investigators calculated that without their tools and
backpacks, the crew could have moved 15 to 20 percent faster. “Most
would have lived had they simply dropped their gear and run for
safety,” one expert wrote. Had they “dropped their packs and tools,”
the U.S. Forest Service concurred, “the firefighters would have
reached the top of the ridge before the fire.”
It’s reasonable to assume that at first the crew might have been
running on autopilot, not even aware that they were still carrying
their packs and tools. “About three hundred yards up the hill,” one of
the Colorado survivors testified, “I then realized I still had my saw
over my shoulder!” Even after making the wise decision to ditch the
25-pound chainsaw, he wasted valuable time: “I irrationally started
looking for a place to put it down where it wouldn’t get burned. . . . I
remember thinking, ‘I can’t believe I’m putting down my saw.’” One
of the victims was found wearing his backpack, still clutching the
handle of his chainsaw. Why would so many firefighters cling to a set
of tools even though letting go might save their lives?
If you’re a firefighter, dropping your tools doesn’t just require
you to unlearn habits and disregard instincts. Discarding your
equipment means admitting failure and shedding part of your
identity. You have to rethink your goal in your job—and your role in
life. “Fires are not fought with bodies and bare hands, they are fought
with tools that are often distinctive trademarks of firefighters,”
organizational psychologist Karl Weick explains: “They are the
firefighter’s reason for being deployed in the first place. . . . Dropping
one’s tools creates an existential crisis. Without my tools, who am I?”
Wildland fires are relatively rare. Most of our lives don’t depend
on split-second decisions that force us to reimagine our tools as a
source of danger and a fire as a path to safety. Yet the challenge of
rethinking assumptions is surprisingly common—maybe even
common to all humans.
We all make the same kind of mistakes as smokejumpers and
firefighters, but the consequences are less dire and therefore often go
unnoticed. Our ways of thinking become habits that can weigh us
down, and we don’t bother to question them until it’s too late.
Expecting your squeaky brakes to keep working until they finally fail
on the freeway. Believing the stock market will keep going up after
analysts warn of an impending real estate bubble. Assuming your
marriage is fine despite your partner’s increasing emotional distance.
Feeling secure in your job even though some of your colleagues have
been laid off.
This book is about the value of rethinking. It’s about adopting
the kind of mental flexibility that saved Wagner Dodge’s life. It’s also
about succeeding where he failed: encouraging that same agility in
others.
You may not carry an ax or a shovel, but you do have some
cognitive tools that you use regularly. They might be things you
know, assumptions you make, or opinions you hold. Some of them
aren’t just part of your job—they’re part of your sense of self.
Consider a group of students who built what has been called
Harvard’s first online social network. Before they arrived at college,
they had already connected more than an eighth of the entering
freshman class in an “e-group.” But once they got to Cambridge, they
abandoned the network and shut it down. Five years later Mark
Zuckerberg started Facebook on the same campus.
From time to time, the students who created the original e-group
have felt some pangs of regret. I know, because I was one of the
cofounders of that group.
Let’s be clear: I never would have had the vision for what
Facebook became. In hindsight, though, my friends and I clearly
missed a series of chances for rethinking the potential of our
platform. Our first instinct was to use the e-group to make new
friends for ourselves; we didn’t consider whether it would be of
interest to students at other schools or in life beyond school. Our
well-learned habit was to use online tools to connect with people far
away; once we lived within walking distance on the same campus, we
figured we no longer needed the e-group. Although one of the
cofounders was studying computer science and another early
member had already founded a successful tech startup, we made the
flawed assumption that an online social network was a passing
hobby, not a huge part of the future of the internet. Since I didn’t
know how to code, I didn’t have the tools to build something more
sophisticated. Launching a company wasn’t part of my identity
anyway: I saw myself as a college freshman, not a budding
entrepreneur.
Since then, rethinking has become central to my sense of self.
I’m a psychologist but I’m not a fan of Freud, I don’t have a couch in
my office, and I don’t do therapy. As an organizational psychologist
at Wharton, I’ve spent the past fifteen years researching and teaching
evidence-based management. As an entrepreneur of data and ideas,
I’ve been called by organizations like Google, Pixar, the NBA, and the
Gates Foundation to help them reexamine how they design
meaningful jobs, build creative teams, and shape collaborative
cultures. My job is to think again about how we work, lead, and live—
and enable others to do the same.
I can’t think of a more vital time for rethinking. As the
coronavirus pandemic unfolded, many leaders around the world
were slow to rethink their assumptions—first that the virus wouldn’t
affect their countries, next that it would be no deadlier than the flu,
and then that it could only be transmitted by people with visible
symptoms. The cost in human life is still being tallied.
In the past year we’ve all had to put our mental pliability to the
test. We’ve been forced to question assumptions that we had long
taken for granted: That it’s safe to go to the hospital, eat in a
restaurant, and hug our parents or grandparents. That live sports
will always be on TV and most of us will never have to work remotely
or homeschool our kids. That we can get toilet paper and hand
sanitizer whenever we need them.
In the midst of the pandemic, multiple acts of police brutality led
many people to rethink their views on racial injustice and their roles
in fighting it. The senseless deaths of three Black citizens—George
Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and Ahmaud Arbery—left millions of white
people realizing that just as sexism is not only a women’s issue,
racism is not only an issue for people of color. As waves of protest
swept the nation, across the political spectrum, support for the Black
Lives Matter movement climbed nearly as much in the span of two
weeks as it had in the previous two years. Many of those who had
long been unwilling or unable to acknowledge it quickly came to
grips with the harsh reality of systemic racism that still pervades
America. Many of those who had long been silent came to reckon
with their responsibility to become antiracists and act against
prejudice.
Despite these shared experiences, we live in an increasingly
divisive time. For some people a single mention of kneeling during
the national anthem is enough to end a friendship. For others a
single ballot at a voting booth is enough to end a marriage. Calcified
ideologies are tearing American culture apart. Even our great
governing document, the U.S. Constitution, allows for amendments.
What if we were quicker to make amendments to our own mental
constitutions?
My aim in this book is to explore how rethinking happens. I
sought out the most compelling evidence and some of the world’s
most skilled rethinkers. The first section focuses on opening our own
minds. You’ll find out why a forward-thinking entrepreneur got
trapped in the past, why a long-shot candidate for public office came
to see impostor syndrome as an advantage, how a Nobel Prize–
winning scientist embraces the joy of being wrong, how the world’s
best forecasters update their views, and how an Oscar-winning
filmmaker has productive fights.
The second section examines how we can encourage other people
to think again. You’ll learn how an international debate champion
wins arguments and a Black musician persuades white supremacists
to abandon hate. You’ll discover how a special kind of listening
helped a doctor open parents’ minds about vaccines, and helped a
legislator convince a Ugandan warlord to join her in peace talks. And
if you’re a Yankees fan, I’m going to see if I can convince you to root
for the Red Sox.
The third section is about how we can create communities of
lifelong learners. In social life, a lab that specializes in difficult
conversations will shed light on how we can communicate better
about polarizing issues like abortion and climate change. In schools,
you’ll find out how educators teach kids to think again by treating
classrooms like museums, approaching projects like carpenters, and
rewriting time-honored textbooks. At work, you’ll explore how to
build learning cultures with the first Hispanic woman in space, who
took the reins at NASA to prevent accidents after space shuttle
Columbia disintegrated. I close by reflecting on the importance of
reconsidering our best-laid plans.
It’s a lesson that firefighters have learned the hard way. In the
heat of the moment, Wagner Dodge’s impulse to drop his heavy tools
and take shelter in a fire of his own making made the difference
between life and death. But his inventiveness wouldn’t have even
been necessary if not for a deeper, more systemic failure to think
again. The greatest tragedy of Mann Gulch is that a dozen
smokejumpers died fighting a fire that never needed to be fought.
As early as the 1880s, scientists had begun highlighting the
important role that wildfires play in the life cycles of forests. Fires
remove dead matter, send nutrients into the soil, and clear a path for
sunlight. When fires are suppressed, forests are left too dense. The
accumulation of brush, dry leaves, and twigs becomes fuel for more
explosive wildfires.
Yet it wasn’t until 1978 that the U.S. Forest Service put an end to
its policy that every fire spotted should be extinguished by 10:00
a.m. the following day. The Mann Gulch wildfire took place in a
remote area where human lives were not at risk. The smokejumpers
were called in anyway because no one in their community, their
organization, or their profession had done enough to question the
assumption that wildfires should not be allowed to run their course.
This book is an invitation to let go of knowledge and opinions
that are no longer serving you well, and to anchor your sense of self
in flexibility rather than consistency. If you can master the art of
rethinking, I believe you’ll be better positioned for success at work
and happiness in life. Thinking again can help you generate new
solutions to old problems and revisit old solutions to new problems.
It’s a path to learning more from the people around you and living
with fewer regrets. A hallmark of wisdom is knowing when it’s time
to abandon some of your most treasured tools—and some of the most
cherished parts of your identity.
PART I
Individual Rethinking
Updating Our Own Views
CHAPTER 1
A Preacher, a Prosecutor, a Politician,
and a Scientist Walk into Your Mind
Progress is impossible without change; and those who cannot
change their minds cannot change anything.
—
Y
ou probably don’t recognize his name, but Mike Lazaridis has
had a defining impact on your life. From an early age, it was
clear that Mike was something of an electronics wizard. By the
time he turned four, he was building his own record player out of
Legos and rubber bands. In high school, when his teachers had
broken TVs, they called Mike to fix them. In his spare time, he built a
computer and designed a better buzzer for high school quiz-bowl
teams, which ended up paying for his first year of college. Just
months before finishing his electrical engineering degree, Mike did
what so many great entrepreneurs of his era would do: he dropped
out of college. It was time for this son of immigrants to make his
mark on the world.
Mike’s first success came when he patented a device for reading
the bar codes on movie film, which was so useful in Hollywood that it
won an Emmy and an Oscar for technical achievement. That was
small potatoes compared to his next big invention, which made his
firm the fastest-growing company on the planet. Mike’s flagship
device quickly attracted a cult following, with loyal customers
ranging from Bill Gates to Christina Aguilera. “It’s literally changed
my life,” Oprah Winfrey gushed. “I cannot live without this.” When
he arrived at the White House, President Obama refused to
relinquish his to the Secret Service.
Mike Lazaridis dreamed up the idea for the BlackBerry as a
wireless communication device for sending and receiving emails. As
of the summer of 2009, it accounted for nearly half of the U.S.
smartphone market. By 2014, its market share had plummeted to
less than 1 percent.
When a company takes a nosedive like that, we can never
pinpoint a single cause of its downfall, so we tend to
anthropomorphize it: BlackBerry failed to adapt. Yet adapting to a
changing environment isn’t something a company does—it’s
something people do in the multitude of decisions they make every
day. As the cofounder, president, and co-CEO, Mike was in charge of
all the technical and product decisions on the BlackBerry. Although
his thinking may have been the spark that ignited the smartphone
revolution, his struggles with rethinking ended up sucking the
oxygen out of his company and virtually extinguishing his invention.
Where did he go wrong?
Most of us take pride in our knowledge and expertise, and in
staying true to our beliefs and opinions. That makes sense in a stable
world, where we get rewarded for having conviction in our ideas. The
problem is that we live in a rapidly changing world, where we need to
spend as much time rethinking as we do thinking.
Rethinking is a skill set, but it’s also a mindset. We already have
many of the mental tools we need. We just have to remember to get
them out of the shed and remove the rust.
SECOND THOUGHTS
With advances in access to information and technology, knowledge
isn’t just increasing. It’s increasing at an increasing rate. In 2011, you
consumed about five times as much information per day as you
would have just a quarter century earlier. As of 1950, it took about
fifty years for knowledge in medicine to double. By 1980, medical
knowledge was doubling every seven years, and by 2010, it was
doubling in half that time. The accelerating pace of change means
that we need to question our beliefs more readily than ever before.
This is not an easy task. As we sit with our beliefs, they tend to
become more extreme and more entrenched. I’m still struggling to
accept that Pluto may not be a planet. In education, after revelations
in history and revolutions in science, it often takes years for a
curriculum to be updated and textbooks to be revised. Researchers
have recently discovered that we need to rethink widely accepted
assumptions about such subjects as Cleopatra’s roots (her father was
Greek, not Egyptian, and her mother’s identity is unknown); the
appearance of dinosaurs (paleontologists now think some
tyrannosaurs had colorful feathers on their backs); and what’s
required for sight (blind people have actually trained themselves to
“see”—sound waves can activate the visual cortex and create
representations in the mind’s eye, much like how echolocation helps
bats navigate in the dark).* Vintage records, classic cars, and antique
clocks might be valuable collectibles, but outdated facts are mental
fossils that are best abandoned.
We’re swift to recognize when other people need to think again.
We question the judgment of experts whenever we seek out a second
opinion on a medical diagnosis. Unfortunately, when it comes to our
own knowledge and opinions, we often favor feeling right over being
right. In everyday life, we make many diagnoses of our own, ranging
from whom we hire to whom we marry. We need to develop the habit
of forming our own second opinions.
Imagine you have a family friend who’s a financial adviser, and
he recommends investing in a retirement fund that isn’t in your
employer’s plan. You have another friend who’s fairly knowledgeable
about investing, and he tells you that this fund is risky. What would
you do?
When a man named Stephen Greenspan found himself in that
situation, he decided to weigh his skeptical friend’s warning against
the data available. His sister had been investing in the fund for
several years, and she was pleased with the results. A number of her
friends had been, too; although the returns weren’t extraordinary,
they were consistently in the double digits. The financial adviser was
enough of a believer that he had invested his own money in the fund.
Armed with that information, Greenspan decided to go forward. He
made a bold move, investing nearly a third of his retirement savings
in the fund. Before long, he learned that his portfolio had grown by
25 percent.
Then he lost it all overnight when the fund collapsed. It was the
Ponzi scheme managed by Bernie Madoff.
Two decades ago my colleague Phil Tetlock discovered
something peculiar. As we think and talk, we often slip into the
mindsets of three different professions: preachers, prosecutors, and
politicians. In each of these modes, we take on a particular identity
and use a distinct set of tools. We go into preacher mode when our
sacred beliefs are in jeopardy: we deliver sermons to protect and
promote our ideals. We enter prosecutor mode when we recognize
flaws in other people’s reasoning: we marshal arguments to prove
them wrong and win our case. We shift into politician mode when
we’re seeking to win over an audience: we campaign and lobby for
the approval of our constituents. The risk is that we become so
wrapped up in preaching that we’re right, prosecuting others who are
wrong, and politicking for support that we don’t bother to rethink
our own views.
When Stephen Greenspan and his sister made the choice to
invest with Bernie Madoff, it wasn’t because they relied on just one of
those mental tools. All three modes together contributed to their illfated decision. When his sister told him about the money she and her
friends had made, she was preaching about the merits of the fund.
Her confidence led Greenspan to prosecute the friend who warned
him against investing, deeming the friend guilty of “knee-jerk
cynicism.” Greenspan was in politician mode when he let his desire
for approval sway him toward a yes—the financial adviser was a
family friend whom he liked and wanted to please.
Any of us could have fallen into those traps. Greenspan says that
he should’ve known better, though, because he happens to be an
expert on gullibility. When he decided to go ahead with the
investment, he had almost finished writing a book on why we get
duped. Looking back, he wishes he had approached the decision with
a different set of tools. He might have analyzed the fund’s strategy
more systematically instead of simply trusting in the results. He
could have sought out more perspectives from credible sources. He
would have experimented with investing smaller amounts over a
longer period of time before gambling so much of his life’s savings.
That would have put him in the mode of a scientist.
A DIFFERENT PAIR OF GOGGLES
If you’re a scientist by trade, rethinking is fundamental to your
profession. You’re paid to be constantly aware of the limits of your
understanding. You’re expected to doubt what you know, be curious
about what you don’t know, and update your views based on new
data. In the past century alone, the application of scientific principles
has led to dramatic progress. Biological scientists discovered
penicillin. Rocket scientists sent us to the moon. Computer scientists
built the internet.
But being a scientist is not just a profession. It’s a frame of mind
—a mode of thinking that differs from preaching, prosecuting, and
politicking. We move into scientist mode when we’re searching for
the truth: we run experiments to test hypotheses and discover
knowledge. Scientific tools aren’t reserved for people with white
coats and beakers, and using them doesn’t require toiling away for
years with a microscope and a petri dish. Hypotheses have as much
of a place in our lives as they do in the lab. Experiments can inform
our daily decisions. That makes me wonder: is it possible to train
people in other fields to think more like scientists, and if so, do they
end up making smarter choices?
Recently, a quartet of European researchers decided to find out.
They ran a bold experiment with more than a hundred founders of
Italian startups in technology, retail, furniture, food, health care,
leisure, and machinery. Most of the founders’ businesses had yet to
bring in any revenue, making it an ideal setting to investigate how
teaching scientific thinking would influence the bottom line.
The entrepreneurs arrived in Milan for a training program in
entrepreneurship. Over the course of four months, they learned to
create a business strategy, interview customers, build a minimum
viable product, and then refine a prototype. What they didn’t know
was that they’d been randomly assigned to either a “scientific
thinking” group or a control group. The training for both groups was
identical, except that one was encouraged to view startups through a
scientist’s goggles. From that perspective, their strategy is a theory,
customer interviews help to develop hypotheses, and their minimum
viable product and prototype are experiments to test those
hypotheses. Their task is to rigorously measure the results and make
decisions based on whether their hypotheses are supported or
refuted.
Over the following year, the startups in the control group
averaged under $300 in revenue. The startups in the scientific
thinking group averaged over $12,000 in revenue. They brought in
revenue more than twice as fast—and attracted customers sooner,
too. Why? The entrepreneurs in the control group tended to stay
wedded to their original strategies and products. It was too easy to
preach the virtues of their past decisions, prosecute the vices of
alternative options, and politick by catering to advisers who favored
the existing direction. The entrepreneurs who had been taught to
think like scientists, in contrast, pivoted more than twice as often.
When their hypotheses weren’t supported, they knew it was time to
rethink their business models.
What’s surprising about these results is that we typically
celebrate great entrepreneurs and leaders for being strong-minded
and clear-sighted. They’re supposed to be paragons of conviction:
decisive and certain. Yet evidence reveals that when business
executives compete in tournaments to price products, the best
strategists are actually slow and unsure. Like careful scientists, they
take their time so they have the flexibility to change their minds. I’m
beginning to think decisiveness is overrated . . . but I reserve the
right to change my mind.
Just as you don’t have to be a professional scientist to reason like
one, being a professional scientist doesn’t guarantee that someone
will use the tools of their training. Scientists morph into preachers
when they present their pet theories as gospel and treat thoughtful
critiques as sacrilege. They veer into politician terrain when they
allow their views to be swayed by popularity rather than accuracy.
They enter prosecutor mode when they’re hell-bent on debunking
and discrediting rather than discovering. After upending physics
with his theories of relativity, Einstein opposed the quantum
revolution: “To punish me for my contempt of authority, Fate has
made me an authority myself.” Sometimes even great scientists need
to think more like scientists.
Decades before becoming a smartphone pioneer, Mike Lazaridis
was recognized as a science prodigy. In middle school, he made the
local news for building a solar panel at the science fair and won an
award for reading every science book in the public library. If you
open his eighth-grade yearbook, you’ll see a cartoon showing Mike as
a mad scientist, with bolts of lightning shooting out of his head.
When Mike created the BlackBerry, he was thinking like a
scientist. Existing devices for wireless email featured a stylus that
was too slow or a keyboard that was too small. People had to clunkily
forward their work emails to their mobile device in-boxes, and they
took forever to download. He started generating hypotheses and sent
his team of engineers off to test them. What if people could hold the
device in their hands and type with their thumbs rather than their
fingers? What if there was a single mailbox synchronized across
devices? What if messages could be relayed through a server and
appear on the device only after they were decrypted?
As other companies followed BlackBerry’s lead, Mike would take
their smartphones apart and study them. Nothing really impressed
him until the summer of 2007, when he was stunned by the
computing power inside the first iPhone. “They’ve put a Mac in this
thing,” he said. What Mike did next might have been the beginning of
the end for the BlackBerry. If the BlackBerry’s rise was due in large
part to his success in scientific thinking as an engineer, its demise
was in many ways the result of his failure in rethinking as a CEO.
As the iPhone skyrocketed onto the scene, Mike maintained his
belief in the features that had made the BlackBerry a sensation in the
past. He was confident that people wanted a wireless device for work
emails and calls, not an entire computer in their pocket with apps for
home entertainment. As early as 1997, one of his top engineers
wanted to add an internet browser, but Mike told him to focus only
on email. A decade later, Mike was still certain that a powerful
internet browser would drain the battery and strain the bandwidth of
wireless networks. He didn’t test the alternative hypotheses.
By 2008, the company’s valuation exceeded $70 billion, but the
BlackBerry remained the company’s sole product, and it still lacked a
reliable browser. In 2010, when his colleagues pitched a strategy to
feature encrypted text messages, Mike was receptive but expressed
concerns that allowing messages to be exchanged on competitors’
devices would render the BlackBerry obsolete. As his reservations
gained traction within the firm, the company abandoned instant
messaging, missing an opportunity that WhatsApp later seized for
upwards of $19 billion. As gifted as Mike was at rethinking the
design of electronic devices, he wasn’t willing to rethink the market
for his baby. Intelligence was no cure—it might have been more of a
curse.
THE SMARTER THEY ARE, THE HARDER THEY
FAIL
Mental horsepower doesn’t guarantee mental dexterity. No matter
how much brainpower you have, if you lack the motivation to change
your mind, you’ll miss many occasions to think again. Research
reveals that the higher you score on an IQ test, the more likely you
are to fall for stereotypes, because you’re faster at recognizing
patterns. And recent experiments suggest that the smarter you are,
the more you might struggle to update your beliefs.
One study investigated whether being a math whiz makes you
better at analyzing data. The answer is yes—if you’re told the data are
about something bland, like a treatment for skin rashes. But what if
the exact same data are labeled as focusing on an ideological issue
that activates strong emotions—like gun laws in the United States?
Being a quant jock makes you more accurate in interpreting the
results—as long as they support your beliefs. Yet if the empirical
pattern clashes with your ideology, math prowess is no longer an
asset; it actually becomes a liability. The better you are at crunching
numbers, the more spectacularly you fail at analyzing patterns that
contradict your views. If they were liberals, math geniuses did worse
than their peers at evaluating evidence that gun bans failed. If they
were conservatives, they did worse at assessing evidence that gun
bans worked.
In psychology there are at least two biases that drive this pattern.
One is confirmation bias: seeing what we expect to see. The other is
desirability bias: seeing what we want to see. These biases don’t just
prevent us from applying our intelligence. They can actually contort
our intelligence into a weapon against the truth. We find reasons to
preach our faith more deeply, prosecute our case more passionately,
and ride the tidal wave of our political party. The tragedy is that
we’re usually unaware of the resulting flaws in our thinking.
My favorite bias is the “I’m not biased” bias, in which people
believe they’re more objective than others. It turns out that smart
people are more likely to fall into this trap. The brighter you are, the
harder it can be to see your own limitations. Being good at thinking
can make you worse at rethinking.
When we’re in scientist mode, we refuse to let our ideas become
ideologies. We don’t start with answers or solutions; we lead with
questions and puzzles. We don’t preach from intuition; we teach
from evidence. We don’t just have healthy skepticism about other
people’s arguments; we dare to disagree with our own arguments.
Thinking like a scientist involves more than just reacting with an
open mind. It means being actively open-minded. It requires
searching for reasons why we might be wrong—not for reasons why
we must be right—and revising our views based on what we learn.
That rarely happens in the other mental modes. In preacher
mode, changing our minds is a mark of moral weakness; in scientist
mode, it’s a sign of intellectual integrity. In prosecutor mode,
allowing ourselves to be persuaded is admitting defeat; in scientist
mode, it’s a step toward the truth. In politician mode, we flip-flop in
response to carrots and sticks; in scientist mode, we shift in the face
of sharper logic and stronger data.
I’ve done my best to write this book in scientist mode.* I’m a
teacher, not a preacher. I can’t stand politics, and I hope a decade as
a tenured professor has cured me of whatever temptation I once felt
to appease my audience. Although I’ve spent more than my share of
time in prosecutor mode, I’ve decided that in a courtroom I’d rather
be the judge. I don’t expect you to agree with everything I think. My
hope is that you’ll be intrigued by how I think—and that the studies,
stories, and ideas covered here will lead you to do some rethinking of
your own. After all, the purpose of learning isn’t to affirm our beliefs;
it’s to evolve our beliefs.
One of my beliefs is that we shouldn’t be open-minded in every
circumstance. There are situations where it might make sense to
preach, prosecute, and politick. That said, I think most of us would
benefit from being more open more of the time, because it’s in
scientist mode that we gain mental agility.
When psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi studied eminent
scientists like Linus Pauling and Jonas Salk, he concluded that what
differentiated them from their peers was their cognitive flexibility,
their willingness “to move from one extreme to the other as the
occasion requires.” The same pattern held for great artists, and in an
independent study of highly creative architects.
We can even see it in the Oval Office. Experts assessed American
presidents on a long list of personality traits and compared them to
rankings by independent historians and political scientists. Only one
trait consistently predicted presidential greatness after controlling
for factors like years in office, wars, and scandals. It wasn’t whether
presidents were ambitious or forceful, friendly or Machiavellian; it
wasn’t whether they were attractive, witty, poised, or polished.
What set great presidents apart was their intellectual curiosity
and openness. They read widely and were as eager to learn about
developments in biology, philosophy, architecture, and music as in
domestic and foreign affairs. They were interested in hearing new
views and revising their old ones. They saw many of their policies as
experiments to run, not points to score. Although they might have
been politicians by profession, they often solved problems like
scientists.
DON’T STOP UNBELIEVING
As I’ve studied the process of rethinking, I’ve found that it often
unfolds in a cycle. It starts with intellectual humility—knowing what
we don’t know. We should all be able to make a long list of areas
where we’re ignorant. Mine include art, financial markets, fashion,
chemistry, food, why British accents turn American in songs, and
why it’s impossible to tickle yourself. Recognizing our shortcomings
opens the door to doubt. As we question our current understanding,
we become curious about what information we’re missing. That
search leads us to new discoveries, which in turn maintain our
humility by reinforcing how much we still have to learn. If knowledge
is power, knowing what we don’t know is wisdom.
Scientific thinking favors humility over pride, doubt over
certainty, curiosity over closure. When we shift out of scientist mode,
the rethinking cycle breaks down, giving way to an overconfidence
cycle. If we’re preaching, we can’t see gaps in our knowledge: we
believe we’ve already found the truth. Pride breeds conviction rather
than doubt, which makes us prosecutors: we might be laser-focused
on changing other people’s minds, but ours is set in stone. That
launches us into confirmation bias and desirability bias. We become
politicians, ignoring or dismissing whatever doesn’t win the favor of
our constituents—our parents, our bosses, or the high school
classmates we’re still trying to impress. We become so busy putting
on a show that the truth gets relegated to a backstage seat, and the
resulting validation can make us arrogant. We fall victim to the fatcat syndrome, resting on our laurels instead of pressure-testing our
beliefs.
In the case of the BlackBerry, Mike Lazaridis was trapped in an
overconfidence cycle. Taking pride in his successful invention gave
him too much conviction. Nowhere was that clearer than in his
preference for the keyboard over a touchscreen. It was a BlackBerry
virtue he loved to preach—and an Apple vice he was quick to
prosecute. As his company’s stock fell, Mike got caught up in
confirmation bias and desirability bias, and fell victim to validation
from fans. “It’s an iconic product,” he said of the BlackBerry in 2011.
“It’s used by business, it’s used by leaders, it’s used by celebrities.” By
2012, the iPhone had captured a quarter of the global smartphone
market, but Mike was still resisting the idea of typing on glass. “I
don’t get this,” he said at a board meeting, pointing at a phone with a
touchscreen. “The keyboard is one of the reasons they buy
BlackBerrys.” Like a politician who campaigns only to his base, he
focused on the keyboard taste of millions of existing users, neglecting
the appeal of a touchscreen to billions of potential users. For the
record, I still miss the keyboard, and I’m excited that it’s been
licensed for an attempted comeback.
When Mike finally started reimagining the screen and software,
some of his engineers didn’t want to abandon their past work. The
failure to rethink was widespread. In 2011, an anonymous high-level
employee inside the firm wrote an open letter to Mike and his coCEO. “We laughed and said they are trying to put a computer on a
phone, that it won’t work,” the letter read. “We are now 3–4 years
too late.”
Our convictions can lock us in prisons of our own making. The
solution is not to decelerate our thinking—it’s to accelerate our
rethinking. That’s what resurrected Apple from the brink of
bankruptcy to become the world’s most valuable company.
The legend of Apple’s renaissance revolves around the lone
genius of Steve Jobs. It was his conviction and clarity of vision, the
story goes, that gave birth to the iPhone. The reality is that he was
dead-set against the mobile phone category. His employees had the
vision for it, and it was their ability to change his mind that really
revived Apple. Although Jobs knew how to “think different,” it was
his team that did much of the rethinking.
In 2004, a small group of engineers, designers, and marketers
pitched Jobs on turning their hit product, the iPod, into a phone.
“Why the f@*& would we want to do that?” Jobs snapped. “That is
the dumbest idea I’ve ever heard.” The team had recognized that
mobile phones were starting to feature the ability to play music, but
Jobs was worried about cannibalizing Apple’s thriving iPod business.
He hated cell-phone companies and didn’t want to design products
within the constraints that carriers imposed. When his calls dropped
or the software crashed, he would sometimes smash his phone to
pieces in frustration. In private meetings and on public stages, he
swore over and over that he would never make a phone.
Yet some of Apple’s engineers were already doing research in
that area. They worked together to persuade Jobs that he didn’t
know what he didn’t know and urged him to doubt his convictions. It
might be possible, they argued, to build a smartphone that everyone
would love using—and to get the carriers to do it Apple’s way.
Research shows that when people are resistant to change, it
helps to reinforce what will stay the same. Visions for change are
more compelling when they include visions of continuity. Although
our strategy might evolve, our identity will endure.
The engineers who worked closely with Jobs understood that
this was one of the best ways to convince him. They assured him that
they weren’t trying to turn Apple into a phone company. It would
remain a computer company—they were just taking their existing
products and adding a phone on the side. Apple was already putting
twenty thousand songs in your pocket, so why wouldn’t they put
everything else in your pocket, too? They needed to rethink their
technology, but they would preserve their DNA. After six months of
discussion, Jobs finally became curious enough to give the effort his
blessing, and two different teams were off to the races in an
experiment to test whether they should add calling capabilities to the
iPod or turn the Mac into a miniature tablet that doubled as a phone.
Just four years after it launched, the iPhone accounted for half of
Apple’s revenue.
The iPhone represented a dramatic leap in rethinking the
smartphone. Since its inception, smartphone innovation has been
much more incremental, with different sizes and shapes, better
cameras, and longer battery life, but few fundamental changes to the
purpose or user experience. Looking back, if Mike Lazaridis had been
more open to rethinking his pet product, would BlackBerry and
Apple have compelled each other to reimagine the smartphone
multiple times by now?
The curse of knowledge is that it closes our minds to what we
don’t know. Good judgment depends on having the skill—and the
will—to open our minds. I’m pretty confident that in life, rethinking
is an increasingly important habit. Of course, I might be wrong. If I
am, I’ll be quick to think again.
CHAPTER 2
The Armchair Quarterback and the
Impostor
Finding the Sweet Spot of Confidence
Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does
knowledge.
—
W
hen Ursula Mercz was admitted to the clinic, she
complained of headaches, back pain, and dizziness severe
enough that she could no longer work. Over the following
month her condition deteriorated. She struggled to locate the glass of
water she put next to her bed. She couldn’t find the door to her room.
She walked directly into her bed frame.
Ursula was a seamstress in her midfifties, and she hadn’t lost her
dexterity: she was able to cut different shapes out of paper with
scissors. She could easily point to her nose, mouth, arms, and legs,
and had no difficulty describing her home and her pets. For an
Austrian doctor named Gabriel Anton, she presented a curious case.
When Anton put a red ribbon and scissors on the table in front of
her, she couldn’t name them, even though “she confirmed, calmly
and faithfully, that she could see the presented objects.”
She was clearly having problems with language production,
which she acknowledged, and with spatial orientation. Yet something
else was wrong: Ursula could no longer tell the difference between
light and dark. When Anton held up an object and asked her to
describe it, she didn’t even try to look at it but instead reached out to
touch it. Tests showed that her eyesight was severely impaired.
Oddly, when Anton asked her about the deficit, she insisted she
could see. Eventually, when she lost her vision altogether, she
remained completely unaware of it. “It was now extremely
astonishing,” Anton wrote, “that the patient did not notice her
massive and later complete loss of her ability to see . . . she was
mentally blind to her blindness.”
It was the late 1800s, and Ursula wasn’t alone. A decade earlier a
neuropathologist in Zurich had reported a case of a man who
suffered an accident that left him blind but was unaware of it despite
being “intellectually unimpaired.” Although he didn’t blink when a
fist was placed in front of his face and couldn’t see the food on his
plate, “he thought he was in a dark humid hole or cellar.”
Half a century later, a pair of doctors reported six cases of people
who had gone blind but claimed otherwise. “One of the most striking
features in the behavior of our patients was their inability to learn
from their experiences,” the doctors wrote:
As they were not aware of their blindness when they
walked about, they bumped into the furniture and walls but
did not change their behavior. When confronted with their
blindness in a rather pointed fashion, they would either deny
any visual difficulty or remark: “It is so dark in the room;
why don’t they turn the light on?”; “I forgot my glasses,” or
“My vision is not too good, but I can see all right.” The
patients would not accept any demonstration or assurance
which would prove their blindness.
This phenomenon was first described by the Roman philosopher
Seneca, who wrote of a woman who was blind but complained that
she was simply in a dark room. It’s now accepted in the medical
literature as Anton’s syndrome—a deficit of self-awareness in which
a person is oblivious to a physical disability but otherwise doing
fairly well cognitively. It’s known to be caused by damage to the
occipital lobe of the brain. Yet I’ve come to believe that even when
our brains are functioning normally, we’re all vulnerable to a version
of Anton’s syndrome.
We all have blind spots in our knowledge and opinions. The bad
news is that they can leave us blind to our blindness, which gives us
false confidence in our judgment and prevents us from rethinking.
The good news is that with the right kind of confidence, we can learn
to see ourselves more clearly and update our views. In driver’s
training we were taught to identify our visual blind spots and
eliminate them with the help of mirrors and sensors. In life, since
our minds don’t come equipped with those tools, we need to learn to
recognize our cognitive blind spots and revise our thinking
accordingly.
A TALE OF TWO SYNDROMES
On the first day of December 2015, Halla Tómasdóttir got a call she
never expected. The roof of Halla’s house had just given way to a
thick layer of snow and ice. As she watched water pouring down one
of the walls, the friend on the other end of the line asked if Halla had
seen the Facebook posts about her. Someone had started a petition
for Halla to run for the presidency of Iceland.
Halla’s first thought was, Who am I to be president? She had
helped start a university and then cofounded an investment firm in
2007. When the 2008 financial crisis rocked the world, Iceland was
hit particularly hard; all three of its major private commercial banks
defaulted and its currency collapsed. Relative to the size of its
economy, the country faced the worst financial meltdown in human
history, but Halla demonstrated her leadership skills by guiding her
firm successfully through the crisis. Even with that accomplishment,
she didn’t feel prepared for the presidency. She had no political
background; she had never served in government or in any kind of
public-sector role.
It wasn’t the first time Halla had felt like an impostor. At the age
of eight, her piano teacher had placed her on a fast track and
frequently asked her to play in concerts, but she never felt she was
worthy of the honor—and so, before every concert, she felt sick.
Although the stakes were much higher now, the self-doubt felt
familiar. “I had a massive pit in my stomach, like the piano recital
but much bigger,” Halla told me. “It’s the worst case of adult
impostor syndrome I’ve ever had.” For months, she struggled with
the idea of becoming a candidate. As her friends and family
encouraged her to recognize that she had some relevant skills, Halla
was still convinced that she lacked the necessary experience and
confidence. She tried to persuade other women to run—one of whom
ended up ascending to a different office, as the prime minister of
Iceland.
Yet the petition didn’t go away, and Halla’s friends, family, and
colleagues didn’t stop urging her on. Eventually, she found herself
asking, Who am I not to serve? She ultimately decided to go for it,
but the odds were heavily stacked against her. She was running as an
unknown independent candidate in a field of more than twenty
contenders. One of her competitors was particularly powerful—and
particularly dangerous.
When an economist was asked to name the three people most
responsible for Iceland’s bankruptcy, she nominated Davíð Oddsson
for all three spots. As Iceland’s prime minister from 1991 to 2004,
Oddsson put the country’s banks in jeopardy by privatizing them.
Then, as governor of Iceland’s central bank from 2005 to 2009, he
allowed the banks’ balance sheets to balloon to more than ten times
the national GDP. When the people protested his mismanagement,
Oddsson refused to resign and had to be forced out by Parliament.
Time magazine later identified him as one of the twenty-five people
to blame for the financial crisis worldwide. Nevertheless, in 2016
Oddsson announced his candidacy for the presidency of Iceland: “My
experience and knowledge, which is considerable, could go well with
this office.”
In theory, confidence and competence go hand in hand. In
practice, they often diverge. You can see it when people rate their
own leadership skills and are also evaluated by their colleagues,
supervisors, or subordinates. In a meta-analysis of ninety-five
studies involving over a hundred thousand people, women typically
underestimated their leadership skills, while men overestimated
their skills.
You’ve probably met some football fans who are convinced they
know more than the coaches on the sidelines. That’s the armchair
quarterback syndrome, where confidence exceeds competence. Even
after calling financial plays that destroyed an economy, Davíð
Oddsson still refused to acknowledge that he wasn’t qualified to
coach—let alone quarterback. He was blind to his weaknesses.
Jason Adam Katzenstein/The New Yorker Collection/The Cartoon Bank; © Condé Nast
The opposite of armchair quarterback syndrome is impostor
syndrome, where competence exceeds confidence. Think of the
people you know who believe that they don’t deserve their success.
They’re genuinely unaware of just how intelligent, creative, or
charming they are, and no matter how hard you try, you can’t get
them to rethink their views. Even after an online petition proved that
many others had confidence in her, Halla Tómasdóttir still wasn’t
convinced she was qualified to lead her country. She was blind to her
strengths.
Although they had opposite blind spots, being on the extremes of
confidence left both candidates reluctant to rethink their plans. The
ideal level of confidence probably lies somewhere between being an
armchair quarterback and an impostor. How do we find that sweet
spot?
THE IGNORANCE OF ARROGANCE
One of my favorite accolades is a satirical award for research that’s as
entertaining as it is enlightening. It’s called the Ig™ Nobel Prize, and
it’s handed out by actual Nobel laureates. One autumn in college, I
raced to the campus theater to watch the ceremony along with over a
thousand fellow nerds. The winners included a pair of physicists who
created a magnetic field to levitate a live frog, a trio of chemists who
discovered that the biochemistry of romantic love has something in
common with obsessive-compulsive disorder, and a computer
scientist who invented PawSense—software that detects cat paws on
a keyboard and makes an annoying noise to deter them. Unclear
whether it also worked with dogs.
Several of the awards made me laugh, but the honorees who
made me think the most were two psychologists, David Dunning and
Justin Kruger. They had just published a “modest report” on skill
and confidence that would soon become famous. They found that in
many situations, those who can’t . . . don’t know they can’t.
According to what’s now known as the Dunning-Kruger effect, it’s
when we lack competence that we’re most likely to be brimming with
overconfidence.
In the original Dunning-Kruger studies, people who scored the
lowest on tests of logical reasoning, grammar, and sense of humor
had the most inflated opinions of their skills. On average, they
believed they did better than 62 percent of their peers, but in reality
outperformed only 12 percent of them. The less intelligent we are in a
particular domain, the more we seem to overestimate our actual
intelligence in that domain. In a group of football fans, the one who
knows the least is the most likely to be the armchair quarterback,
prosecuting the coach for calling the wrong play and preaching about
a better playbook.
This tendency matters because it compromises self-awareness,
and it trips us up across all kinds of settings. Look what happened
when economists evaluated the operations and management
practices of thousands of companies across a wide range of
industries and countries, and compared their assessments with
managers’ self-ratings:
Sources: World Management Survey; Bloom and Van Reenen 2007; and Maloney 2017b.
In this graph, if self-assessments of performance matched actual
performance, every country would be on the dotted line.
Overconfidence existed in every culture, and it was most rampant
where management was the poorest.*
Of course, management skills can be hard to judge objectively.
Knowledge should be easier—you were tested on yours throughout
school. Compared to most people, how much do you think you know
about each of the following topics—more, less, or the same?
Why English became the official language of the United States
Why women were burned at the stake in Salem
What job Walt Disney had before he drew Mickey Mouse
On which spaceflight humans first laid eyes on the Great Wall
of China
Why eating candy affects how kids behave
One of my biggest pet peeves is feigned knowledge, where people
pretend to know things they don’t. It bothers me so much that at this
very moment I’m writing an entire book about it. In a series of
studies, people rated whether they knew more or less than most
people about a range of topics like these, and then took a quiz to test
their actual knowledge. The more superior participants thought their
knowledge was, the more they overestimated themselves—and the
less interested they were in learning and updating. If you think you
know more about history or science than most people, chances are
you know less than you think. As Dunning quips, “The first rule of
the Dunning-Kruger club is you don’t know you’re a member of the
Dunning-Kruger club.”*
On the questions above, if you felt you knew anything at all,
think again. America has no official language, suspected witches
were hanged in Salem but not burned, Walt Disney didn’t draw
Mickey Mouse (it was the work of an animator named Ub Iwerks),
you can’t actually see the Great Wall of China from space, and the
average effect of sugar on children’s behavior is zero.
Although the Dunning-Kruger effect is often amusing in
everyday life, it was no laughing matter in Iceland. Despite serving as
governor of the central bank, Davíð Oddsson had no training in
finance or economics. Before entering politics, he had created a radio
comedy show, written plays and short stories, gone to law school,
and worked as a journalist. During his reign as Iceland’s prime
minister, Oddsson was so dismissive of experts that he disbanded the
National Economic Institute. To force him out of his post at the
central bank, Parliament had to pass an unconventional law: any
governor would have to have at least a master’s degree in economics.
That didn’t stop Oddsson from running for president a few years
later. He seemed utterly blind to his blindness: he didn’t know what
he didn’t know.
STRANDED AT THE SUMMIT OF MOUNT STUPID
The problem with armchair quarterback syndrome is that it stands in
the way of rethinking. If we’re certain that we know something, we
have no reason to look for gaps and flaws in our knowledge—let
alone fill or correct them. In one study, the people who scored the
lowest on an emotional intelligence test weren’t just the most likely
to overestimate their skills. They were also the most likely to dismiss
their scores as inaccurate or irrelevant—and the least likely to invest
in coaching or self-improvement.
Yes, some of this comes down to our fragile egos. We’re driven to
deny our weaknesses when we want to see ourselves in a positive
light or paint a glowing picture of ourselves to others. A classic case
is the crooked politician who claims to crusade against corruption,
but is actually motivated by willful blindness or social deception. Yet
motivation is only part of the story.*
There’s a less obvious force that clouds our vision of our abilities:
a deficit in metacognitive skill, the ability to think about our
thinking. Lacking competence can leave us blind to our own
incompetence. If you’re a tech entrepreneur and you’re uninformed
about education systems, you can feel certain that your master plan
will fix them. If you’re socially awkward and you’re missing some
insight on social graces, you can strut around believing you’re James
Bond. In high school, a friend told me I didn’t have a sense of humor.
What made her think that? “You don’t laugh at all my jokes.” I’m
hilarious . . . said no funny person ever. I’ll leave it to you to decide
who lacked the sense of humor.
When we lack the knowledge and skills to achieve excellence, we
sometimes lack the knowledge and skills to judge excellence. This
insight should immediately put your favorite confident ignoramuses
in their place. Before we poke fun at them, though, it’s worth
remembering that we all have moments when we are them.
We’re all novices at many things, but we’re not always blind to
that fact. We tend to overestimate ourselves on desirable skills, like
the ability to carry on a riveting conversation. We’re also prone to
overconfidence in situations where it’s easy to confuse experience for
expertise, like driving, typing, trivia, and managing emotions. Yet we
underestimate ourselves when we can easily recognize that we lack
experience—like painting, driving a race car, and rapidly reciting the
alphabet backward. Absolute beginners rarely fall into the DunningKruger trap. If you don’t know a thing about football, you probably
don’t walk around believing you know more than the coach.
It’s when we progress from novice to amateur that we become
overconfident. A bit of knowledge can be a dangerous thing. In too
many domains of our lives, we never gain enough expertise to
question our opinions or discover what we don’t know. We have just
enough information to feel self-assured about making
pronouncements and passing judgment, failing to realize that we’ve
climbed to the top of Mount Stupid without making it over to the
other side.
You can see this phenomenon in one of Dunning’s experiments
that involved people playing the role of doctors in a simulated
zombie apocalypse. When they’ve seen only a handful of injured
victims, their perceived and actual skills match. Unfortunately, as
they gain experience, their confidence climbs faster than their
competence, and confidence remains higher than competence from
that point on.
This might be one of the reasons that patient mortality rates in
hospitals seem to spike in July, when new residents take over. It’s
not their lack of skill alone that proves hazardous; it’s their
overestimation of that skill.
Advancing from novice to amateur can break the rethinking
cycle. As we gain experience, we lose some of our humility. We take
pride in making rapid progress, which promotes a false sense of
mastery. That jump-starts an overconfidence cycle, preventing us
from doubting what we know and being curious about what we don’t.
We get trapped in a beginner’s bubble of flawed assumptions, where
we’re ignorant of our own ignorance.
That’s what happened in Iceland to Davíð Oddsson, whose
arrogance was reinforced by cronies and unchecked by critics. He
was known to surround himself with “fiercely loyal henchmen” from
school and bridge matches, and to keep a checklist of friends and
enemies. Months before the meltdown, Oddsson refused help from
England’s central bank. Then, at the height of the crisis, he brashly
declared in public that he had no intention of covering the debts of
Iceland’s banks. Two years later an independent truth commission
appointed by Parliament charged him with gross negligence.
Oddsson’s downfall, according to one journalist who chronicled
Iceland’s financial collapse, was “arrogance, his absolute conviction
that he knew what was best for the island.”
What he lacked is a crucial nutrient for the mind: humility. The
antidote to getting stuck on Mount Stupid is taking a regular dose of
it. “Arrogance is ignorance plus conviction,” blogger Tim Urban
explains. “While humility is a permeable filter that absorbs life
experience and converts it into knowledge and wisdom, arrogance is
a rubber shield that life experience simply bounces off of.”
WHAT GOLDILOCKS GOT WRONG
Many people picture confidence as a seesaw. Gain too much
confidence, and we tip toward arrogance. Lose too much confidence,
and we become meek. This is our fear with humility: that we’ll end
up having a low opinion of ourselves. We want to keep the seesaw
balanced, so we go into Goldilocks mode and look for the amount of
confidence that’s just right. Recently, though, I learned that this is
the wrong approach.
Humility is often misunderstood. It’s not a matter of having low
self-confidence. One of the Latin roots of humility means “from the
earth.” It’s about being grounded—recognizing that we’re flawed and
fallible.
Confidence is a measure of how much you believe in yourself.
Evidence shows that’s distinct from how much you believe in your
methods. You can be confident in your ability to achieve a goal in the
future while maintaining the humility to question whether you have
the right tools in the present. That’s the sweet spot of confidence.
We become blinded by arrogance when we’re utterly convinced
of our strengths and our strategies. We get paralyzed by doubt when
we lack conviction in both. We can be consumed by an inferiority
complex when we know the right method but feel uncertain about
our ability to execute it. What we want to attain is confident
humility: having faith in our capability while appreciating that we
may not have the right solution or even be addressing the right
problem. That gives us enough doubt to reexamine our old
knowledge and enough confidence to pursue new insights.
When Spanx founder Sara Blakely had the idea for footless
pantyhose, she believed in her ability to make the idea a reality, but
she was full of doubt about her current tools. Her day job was selling
fax machines door-to-door, and she was aware that she didn’t know
anything about fashion, retail, or manufacturing. When she was
designing the prototype, she spent a week driving around to hosiery
mills to ask them for help. When she couldn’t afford a law firm to
apply for a patent, she read a book on the topic and filled out the
application herself. Her doubt wasn’t debilitating—she was confident
she could overcome the challenges in front of her. Her confidence
wasn’t in her existing knowledge—it was in her capacity to learn.
Confident humility can be taught. In one experiment, when
students read a short article about the benefits of admitting what we
don’t know rather than being certain about it, their odds of seeking
extra help in an area of weakness spiked from 65 to 85 percent. They
were also more likely to explore opposing political views to try to
learn from the other side.
Confident humility doesn’t just open our minds to rethinking—it
improves the quality of our rethinking. In college and graduate
school, students who are willing to revise their beliefs get higher
grades than their peers. In high school, students who admit when
they don’t know something are rated by teachers as learning more
effectively and by peers as contributing more to their teams. At the
end of the academic year, they have significantly higher math grades
than their more self-assured peers. Instead of just assuming they’ve
mastered the material, they quiz themselves to test their
understanding.
When adults have the confidence to acknowledge what they don’t
know, they pay more attention to how strong evidence is and spend
more time reading material that contradicts their opinions. In
rigorous studies of leadership effectiveness across the United States
and China, the most productive and innovative teams aren’t run by
leaders who are confident or humble. The most effective leaders
score high in both confidence and humility. Although they have faith
in their strengths, they’re also keenly aware of their weaknesses.
They know they need to recognize and transcend their limits if they
want to push the limits of greatness.
If we care about accuracy, we can’t afford to have blind spots. To
get an accurate picture of our knowledge and skills, it can help to
assess ourselves like scientists looking through a microscope. But
one of my newly formed beliefs is that we’re sometimes better off
underestimating ourselves.
THE BENEFITS OF DOUBT
Just a month and a half before Iceland’s presidential election, Halla
Tómasdóttir was polling at only 1 percent support. To focus on the
most promising candidates, the network airing the first televised
debate announced that they wouldn’t feature anyone with less than
2.5 percent of the vote. On the day of the debate, Halla ended up
barely squeaking through. Over the following month her popularity
skyrocketed. She wasn’t just a viable candidate; she was in the final
four.
A few years later, when I invited her to speak to my class, Halla
mentioned that the psychological fuel that propelled her meteoric
rise was none other than impostor syndrome. Feeling like an
impostor is typically viewed as a bad thing, and for good reason—a
chronic sense of being unworthy can breed misery, crush motivation,
and hold us back from pursuing our ambitions.
From time to time, though, a less crippling sense of doubt
waltzes into many of our minds. Some surveys suggest that more
than half the people you know have felt like impostors at some point
in their careers. It’s thought to be especially common among women
and marginalized groups. Strangely, it also seems to be particularly
pronounced among high achievers.
I’ve taught students who earned patents before they could drink
and became chess masters before they could drive, but these same
individuals still wrestle with insecurity and constantly question their
abilities. The standard explanation for their accomplishments is that
they succeed in spite of their doubts, but what if their success is
actually driven in part by those doubts?
To find out, Basima Tewfik—then a doctoral student at Wharton,
now an MIT professor—recruited a group of medical students who
were preparing to begin their clinical rotations. She had them
interact for more than half an hour with actors who had been trained
to play the role of patients presenting symptoms of various diseases.
Basima observed how the medical students treated the patients—and
also tracked whether they made the right diagnoses.
A week earlier the students had answered a survey about how
often they entertained impostor thoughts like I am not as qualified
as others think I am and People important to me think I am more
capable than I think I am. Those who self-identified as impostors
didn’t do any worse in their diagnoses, and they did significantly
better when it came to bedside manner—they were rated as more
empathetic, respectful, and professional, as well as more effective in
asking questions and sharing information. In another study, Basima
found a similar pattern with investment professionals: the more
often they felt like impostors, the higher their performance reviews
from their supervisors four months later.
This evidence is new, and we still have a lot to learn about when
impostor syndrome is beneficial versus when it’s detrimental. Still, it
leaves me wondering if we’ve been misjudging impostor syndrome by
seeing it solely as a disorder.
When our impostor fears crop up, the usual advice is to ignore
them—give ourselves the benefit of the doubt. Instead, we might be
better off embracing those fears, because they can give us three
benefits of doubt.
The first upside of feeling like an impostor is that it can motivate
us to work harder. It’s probably not helpful when we’re deciding
whether to start a race, but once we’ve stepped up to the starting line,
it gives us the drive to keep running to the end so that we can earn
our place among the finalists.* In some of my own research across
call centers, military and government teams, and nonprofits, I’ve
found that confidence can make us complacent. If we never worry
about letting other people down, we’re more likely to actually do so.
When we feel like impostors, we think we have something to prove.
Impostors may be the last to jump in, but they may also be the last to
bail out.
Second, impostor thoughts can motivate us to work smarter.
When we don’t believe we’re going to win, we have nothing to lose by
rethinking our strategy. Remember that total beginners don’t fall
victim to the Dunning-Kruger effect. Feeling like an impostor puts us
in a beginner’s mindset, leading us to question assumptions that
others have taken for granted.
Third, feeling like an impostor can make us better learners.
Having some doubts about our knowledge and skills takes us off a
pedestal, encouraging us to seek out insights from others. As
psychologist Elizabeth Krumrei Mancuso and her colleagues write,
“Learning requires the humility to realize one has something to
learn.”
Some evidence on this dynamic comes from a study by another
of our former doctoral students at Wharton, Danielle Tussing—now a
professor at SUNY Buffalo. Danielle gathered her data in a hospital
where the leadership role of charge nurse is rotated between shifts,
which means that nurses end up at the helm even if they have doubts
about their capabilities. Nurses who felt some hesitations about
assuming the mantle were actually more effective leaders, in part
because they were more likely to seek out second opinions from
colleagues. They saw themselves on a level playing field, and they
knew that much of what they lacked in experience and expertise they
could make up by listening. There’s no clearer case of that than Halla
Tómasdóttir.
THE LEAGUE OF EXTRAORDINARY HUMILITY
When I sat down with Halla, she told me that in the past her doubts
had been debilitating. She took them as a sign that she lacked the
ability to succeed. Now she had reached a point of confident
humility, and she interpreted doubts differently: they were a cue that
she needed to improve her tools.
Plenty of evidence suggests that confidence is just as often the
result of progress as the cause of it. We don’t have to wait for our
confidence to rise to achieve challenging goals. We can build it
through achieving challenging goals. “I have come to welcome
impostor syndrome as a good thing: it’s fuel to do more, try more,”
Halla says. “I’ve learned to use it to my advantage. I actually thrive
on the growth that comes from the self-doubt.”
While other candidates were content to rely on the usual media
coverage, Halla’s uncertainty about her tools made her eager to
rethink the way campaigns were run. She worked harder and
smarter, staying up late to personally answer social media messages.
She held Facebook Live sessions where voters could ask her
anything, and learned to use Snapchat to reach young people.
Deciding she had nothing to lose, she went where few presidential
candidates had gone before: instead of prosecuting her opponents,
she ran a positive campaign. How much worse can it get? she
thought. It was part of why she resonated so strongly with voters:
they were tired of watching candidates smear one another and
delighted to see a candidate treat her competitors with respect.
Uncertainty primes us to ask questions and absorb new ideas. It
protects us against the Dunning-Kruger effect. “Impostor syndrome
always keeps me on my toes and growing because I never think I
know it all,” Halla reflects, sounding more like a scientist than a
politician. “Maybe impostor syndrome is needed for change.
Impostors rarely say, ‘This is how we do things around here.’ They
don’t say, ‘This is the right way.’ I was so eager to learn and grow that
I asked everyone for advice on how I could do things differently.”
Although she doubted her tools, she had confidence in herself as a
learner. She understood that knowledge is best sought from experts,
but creativity and wisdom can come from anywhere.
Iceland’s presidential election came down to Halla, Davíð
Oddsson, and two other men. The three men all enjoyed more media
coverage than Halla throughout the campaign, including front-page
interviews, which she never received. They also had bigger campaign
budgets. Yet on election day, Halla stunned her country—and herself
—by winning more than a quarter of the vote.
She didn’t land the presidency; she came in second. Her 28
percent fell shy of the victor’s 39 percent. But Halla trounced Davíð
Oddsson, who finished fourth, with less than 14 percent. Based on
her trajectory and momentum, it’s not crazy to imagine that with a
few more weeks, she could have won.
Great thinkers don’t harbor doubts because they’re impostors.
They maintain doubts because they know we’re all partially blind and
they’re committed to improving their sight. They don’t boast about
how much they know; they marvel at how little they understand.
They’re aware that each answer raises new questions, and the quest
for knowledge is never finished. A mark of lifelong learners is
recognizing that they can learn something from everyone they meet.
Arrogance leaves us blind to our weaknesses. Humility is a
reflective lens: it helps us see them clearly. Confident humility is a
corrective lens: it enables us to overcome those weaknesses.
CHAPTER 3
The Joy of Being Wrong
The Thrill of Not Believing Everything You Think
I have a degree from Harvard. Whenever I’m wrong, the world
makes a little less sense.
—
I
.
,
n the fall of 1959, a prominent psychologist welcomed new
participants into a wildly unethical study. He had handpicked a
group of Harvard sophomores to join a series of experiments that
would run through the rest of their time in college. The students
volunteered to spend a couple of hours a week contributing to
knowledge about how personality develops and how psychological
problems can be solved. They had no idea that they were actually
signing up to have their beliefs attacked.
The researcher, Henry Murray, had originally trained as a
physician and biochemist. After becoming a distinguished
psychologist, he was disillusioned that his field paid little attention to
how people navigate difficult interactions, so he decided to create
them in his own lab. He gave students a month to write out their
personal philosophy of life, including their core values and guiding
principles. When they showed up to submit their work, they were
paired with another student who had done the same exercise. They
would have a day or two to read each other’s philosophies, and then
they would be filmed debating them. The experience would be much
more intense than they anticipated.
Murray modeled the study on psychological assessments he had
developed for spies in World War II. As a lieutenant colonel, Murray
had been recruited to vet potential agents for the Office of Strategic
Services, the precursor to the CIA. To gauge how candidates would
handle pressure, he sent them down to a basement to be interrogated
with a bright light shining in their faces. The examiner would wait for
an inconsistency in their accounts to pop up and then scream,
“You’re a liar!” Some candidates quit on the spot; others were
reduced to tears. Those who withstood the onslaught got the gig.
Now Murray was ready for a more systematic study of reactions
to stress. He had carefully screened students to create a sample that
included a wide range of personalities and mental health profiles. He
gave them code names based on their character traits, including
Drill, Quartz, Locust, Hinge, and Lawful—more on him later.
When students arrived for the debate, they discovered that their
sparring partner was not a peer but a law student. What they didn’t
know was that the law student was in cahoots with the research
team: his task was to spend eighteen minutes launching an
aggressive assault on their worldviews. Murray called it a “stressful
interpersonal disputation,” having directed the law student to make
the participants angry and anxious with a “mode of attack” that was
“vehement, sweeping, and personally abusive.” The poor students
sweated and shouted as they struggled to defend their ideals.
The pain didn’t stop there. In the weeks that followed, the
students were invited back to the lab to discuss the films of their own
interactions. They watched themselves grimacing and stringing
together incoherent sentences. All in all, they spent about eight hours
reliving those humiliating eighteen minutes. A quarter century later,
when the participants reflected on the experience, it was clear that
many had found it agonizing. Drill described feeling “unabating
rage.” Locust recalled his bewilderment, anger, chagrin, and
discomfort. “They have deceived me, telling me there was going to be
a discussion, when in fact there was an attack,” he wrote. “How could
they have done this to me; what is the point of this?”
Other participants had a strikingly different response: they
actually seemed to get a kick out of being forced to rethink their
beliefs. “Some may have found the experience mildly discomforting,
in that their cherished (and in my case, at least, sophomoric)
philosophies were challenged in an aggressive manner,” one
participant remembers. “But it was hardly an experience that would
blight one for a week, let alone a life.” Another described the whole
series of events as “highly agreeable.” A third went so far as to call it
“fun.”
Ever since I first read about the participants who reacted
enthusiastically, I’ve been fascinated by what made them tick. How
did they manage to enjoy the experience of having their beliefs
eviscerated—and how can the rest of us learn to do the same?
Since the records of the study are still sealed and the vast
majority of the participants haven’t revealed their identities, I did the
next best thing: I went searching for people like them. I found a
Nobel Prize–winning scientist and two of the world’s top election
forecasters. They aren’t just comfortable being wrong; they actually
seem to be thrilled by it. I think they can teach us something about
how to be more graceful and accepting in moments when we discover
that our beliefs might not be true. The goal is not to be wrong more
often. It’s to recognize that we’re all wrong more often than we’d like
to admit, and the more we deny it, the deeper the hole we dig for
ourselves.
THE DICTATOR POLICING YOUR THOUGHTS
When our son was five, he was excited to learn that his uncle was
expecting a child. My wife and I both predicted a boy, and so did our
son. A few weeks later, we found out the baby would be a girl. When
we broke the news to our son, he burst into tears. “Why are you
crying?” I asked. “Is it because you were hoping your new cousin
would be a boy?”
“No!” he shouted, pounding his fists on the floor. “Because we
were wrong!”
I explained that being wrong isn’t always a bad thing. It can be a
sign that we’ve learned something new—and that discovery itself can
be a delight.
This realization didn’t come naturally to me. Growing up, I was
determined to be right. In second grade I corrected my teacher for
misspelling the word lightning as lightening. When trading baseball
cards I would rattle off statistics from recent games as proof that the
price guide was valuing players inaccurately. My friends found this
annoying and started calling me Mr. Facts. It got so bad that one day
my best friend announced that he wouldn’t talk to me until I
admitted I was wrong. It was the beginning of my journey to become
more accepting of my own fallibility.
In a classic paper, sociologist Murray Davis argued that when
ideas survive, it’s not because they’re true—it’s because they’re
interesting. What makes an idea interesting is that it challenges our
weakly held opinions. Did you know that the moon might originally
have formed inside a vaporous Earth out of magma rain? That a
narwhal’s tusk is actually a tooth? When an idea or assumption
doesn’t matter deeply to us, we’re often excited to question it. The
natural sequence of emotions is surprise (“Really?”) followed by
curiosity (“Tell me more!”) and thrill (“Whoa!”). To paraphrase a line
attributed to Isaac Asimov, great discoveries often begin not with
“Eureka!” but with “That’s funny . . .”
When a core belief is questioned, though, we tend to shut down
rather than open up. It’s as if there’s a miniature dictator living
inside our heads, controlling the flow of facts to our minds, much like
Kim Jong-un controls the press in North Korea. The technical term
for this in psychology is the totalitarian ego, and its job is to keep out
threatening information.
It’s easy to see how an inner dictator comes in handy when
someone attacks our character or intelligence. Those kinds of
personal affronts threaten to shatter aspects of our identities that are
important to us and might be difficult to change. The totalitarian ego
steps in like a bodyguard for our minds, protecting our self-image by
feeding us comforting lies. They’re all just jealous. You’re really,
really, ridiculously good-looking. You’re on the verge of inventing
the next Pet Rock. As physicist Richard Feynman quipped, “You
must not fool yourself—and you are the easiest person to fool.”
Our inner dictator also likes to take charge when our deeply held
opinions are threatened. In the Harvard study of attacking students’
worldviews, the participant who had the strongest negative reaction
was code-named Lawful. He came from a blue-collar background
and was unusually precocious, having started college at sixteen and
joined the study at seventeen. One of his beliefs was that technology
was harming civilization, and he became hostile when his views were
questioned. Lawful went on to become an academic, and when he
penned his magnum opus, it was clear that he hadn’t changed his
mind. His concerns about technology had only intensified:
The Industrial Revolution and its consequences have
been a disaster for the human race. They have greatly
increased the life-expectancy of those of us who live in
“advanced” countries, but they have destabilized society,
have made life unfulfilling, have subjected human beings to
indignities . . . to physical suffering as well . . . and have
inflicted severe damage on the natural world.
That kind of conviction is a common response to threats.
Neuroscientists find that when our core beliefs are challenged, it can
trigger the amygdala, the primitive “lizard brain” that breezes right
past cool rationality and activates a hot fight-or-flight response. The
anger and fear are visceral: it feels as if we’ve been punched in the
mind. The totalitarian ego comes to the rescue with mental armor.
We become preachers or prosecutors striving to convert or condemn
the unenlightened. “Presented with someone else’s argument, we’re
quite adept at spotting the weaknesses,” journalist Elizabeth Kolbert
writes, but “the positions we’re blind about are our own.”
I find this odd, because we weren’t born with our opinions.
Unlike our height or raw intelligence, we have full control over what
we believe is true. We choose our views, and we can choose to
rethink them any time we want. This should be a familiar task,
because we have a lifetime of evidence that we’re wrong on a regular
basis. I was sure I’d finish a draft of this chapter by Friday. I was
certain the cereal with the toucan on the box was Fruit Loops, but I
just noticed the box says Froot Loops. I was sure I put the milk back
in the fridge last night, but strangely it’s sitting on the counter this
morning.
The inner dictator manages to prevail by activating an
overconfidence cycle. First, our wrong opinions are shielded in filter
bubbles, where we feel pride when we see only information that
supports our convictions. Then our beliefs are sealed in echo
chambers, where we hear only from people who intensify and
validate them. Although the resulting fortress can appear
impenetrable, there’s a growing community of experts who are
determined to break through.
ATTACHMENT ISSUES
Not long ago I gave a speech at a conference about my research on
givers, takers, and matchers. I was studying whether generous,
selfish, or fair people were more productive in jobs like sales and
engineering. One of the attendees was Daniel Kahneman, the Nobel
Prize–winning psychologist who has spent much of his career
demonstrating how flawed our intuitions are. He told me afterward
that he was surprised by my finding that givers had higher rates of
failure than takers and matchers—but higher rates of success, too.
When you read a study that surprises you, how do you react?
Many people would get defensive, searching for flaws in the study’s
design or the statistical analysis. Danny did the opposite. His eyes lit
up, and a huge grin appeared on his face. “That was wonderful,” he
said. “I was wrong.”
Later, I sat down with Danny for lunch and asked him about his
reaction. It looked a lot to me like the joy of being wrong—his eyes
twinkled as if he was having fun. He said that in his eighty-five years,
no one had pointed that out before, but yes, he genuinely enjoys
discovering that he was wrong, because it means he is now less
wrong than before.
I knew the feeling. In college, what first attracted me to social
science was reading studies that clashed with my expectations; I
couldn’t wait to tell my roommates about all the assumptions I’d
been rethinking. In my first independent research project, I tested
some predictions of my own, and more than a dozen of my
hypotheses turned out to be false.* It was a major lesson in
intellectual humility, but I wasn’t devastated. I felt an immediate
rush of excitement. Discovering I was wrong felt joyful because it
meant I’d learned something. As Danny told me, “Being wrong is the
only way I feel sure I’ve learned anything.”
Danny isn’t interested in preaching, prosecuting, or politicking.
He’s a scientist devoted to the truth. When I asked him how he stays
in that mode, he said he refuses to let his beliefs become part of his
identity. “I change my mind at a speed that drives my collaborators
crazy,” he explained. “My attachment to my ideas is provisional.
There’s no unconditional love for them.”
Attachment. That’s what keeps us from recognizing when our
opinions are off the mark and rethinking them. To unlock the joy of
being wrong, we need to detach. I’ve learned that two kinds of
detachment are especially useful: detaching your present from your
past and detaching your opinions from your identity.
Let’s start with detaching your present from your past. In
psychology, one way of measuring the similarity between the person
you are right now and your former self is to ask: which pair of circles
best describes how you see yourself?
In the moment, separating your past self from your current self
can be unsettling. Even positive changes can lead to negative
emotions; evolving your identity can leave you feeling derailed and
disconnected. Over time, though, rethinking who you are appears to
become mentally healthy—as long as you can tell a coherent story
about how you got from past to present you. In one study, when
people felt detached from their past selves, they became less
depressed over the course of the year. When you feel as if your life is
changing direction, and you’re in the process of shifting who you are,
it’s easier to walk away from foolish beliefs you once held.
My past self was Mr. Facts—I was too fixated on knowing. Now
I’m more interested in finding out what I don’t know. As Bridgewater
founder Ray Dalio told me, “If you don’t look back at yourself and
think, ‘Wow, how stupid I was a year ago,’ then you must not have
learned much in the last year.”
The second kind of detachment is separating your opinions from
your identity. I’m guessing you wouldn’t want to see a doctor whose
identity is Professional Lobotomist, send your kids to a teacher
whose identity is Corporal Punisher, or live in a town where the
police chief’s identity is Stop-and-Frisker. Once upon a time, all of
these practices were seen as reasonable and effective.
Most of us are accustomed to defining ourselves in terms of our
beliefs, ideas, and ideologies. This can become a problem when it
prevents us from changing our minds as the world changes and
knowledge evolves. Our opinions can become so sacred that we grow
hostile to the mere thought of being wrong, and the totalitarian ego
leaps in to silence counterarguments, squash contrary evidence, and
close the door on learning.
Who you are should be a question of what you value, not what
you believe. Values are your core principles in life—they might be
excellence and generosity, freedom and fairness, or security and
integrity. Basing your identity on these kinds of principles enables
you to remain open-minded about the best ways to advance them.
You want the doctor whose identity is protecting health, the teacher
whose identity is helping students learn, and the police chief whose
identity is promoting safety and justice. When they define
themselves by values rather than opinions, they buy themselves the
flexibility to update their practices in light of new evidence.
THE YODA EFFECT: “YOU MUST UNLEARN
WHAT YOU HAVE LEARNED”
On my quest to find people who enjoy discovering they were wrong, a
trusted colleague told me I had to meet Jean-Pierre Beugoms. He’s in
his late forties, and he’s the sort of person who’s honest to a fault; he
tells the truth even if it hurts. When his son was a toddler, they were
watching a space documentary together, and Jean-Pierre casually
mentioned that the sun would one day turn into a red giant and
engulf the Earth. His son was not amused. Between tears, he cried,
“But I love this planet!” Jean-Pierre felt so terrible that he decided to
bite his tongue instead of mentioning threats that could prevent the
Earth from even lasting that long.
Back in the 1990s, Jean-Pierre had a hobby of collecting the
predictions that pundits made on the news and scoring his own
forecasts against them. Eventually he started competing in
forecasting tournaments—international contests hosted by Good
Judgment, where people try to predict the future. It’s a daunting
task; there’s an old saying that historians can’t even predict the past.
A typical tournament draws thousands of entrants from around the
world to anticipate big political, economic, and technological events.
The questions are time-bound, with measurable, specific results. Will
the current president of Iran still be in office in six months? Which
soccer team will win the next World Cup? In the following year, will
an individual or a company face criminal charges for an accident
involving a self-driving vehicle?
Participants don’t just answer yes or no; they have to give their
odds. It’s a systematic way of testing whether they know what they
don’t know. They get scored months later on accuracy and
calibration—earning points not just for giving the right answer, but
also for having the right level of conviction. The best forecasters have
confidence in their predictions that come true and doubt in their
predictions that prove false.
On November 18, 2015, Jean-Pierre registered a prediction that
stunned his opponents. A day earlier, a new question had popped up
in an open forecasting tournament: in July 2016, who would win the
U.S. Republican presidential primary? The options were Jeb Bush,
Ben Carson, Ted Cruz, Carly Fiorina, Marco Rubio, Donald Trump,
and none of the above. With eight months to go before the
Republican National Convention, Trump was largely seen as a joke.
His odds of becoming the Republican nominee were only 6 percent
according to Nate Silver, the celebrated statistician behind the
website FiveThirtyEight. When Jean-Pierre peered into his crystal
ball, though, he decided Trump had a 68 percent chance of winning.
Jean-Pierre didn’t just excel in predicting the results of American
events. His Brexit forecasts hovered in the 50 percent range when
most of his competitors thought the referendum had little chance of
passing. He successfully predicted that the incumbent would lose a
presidential election in Senegal, even though the base rates of
reelection were extremely high and other forecasters were expecting
a decisive win. And he had, in fact, pegged Trump as the favorite long
before pundits and pollsters even considered him a viable contender.
“It’s striking,” Jean-Pierre wrote early on, back in 2015, that so many
forecasters are “still in denial about his chances.”
Based on his performance, Jean-Pierre might be the world’s best
election forecaster. His advantage: he thinks like a scientist. He’s
passionately dispassionate. At various points in his life, Jean-Pierre
has changed his political ideologies and religious beliefs.* He doesn’t
come from a polling or statistics background; he’s a military
historian, which means he has no stake in the way things have always
been done in forecasting. The statisticians were attached to their
views about how to aggregate polls. Jean-Pierre paid more attention
to factors that were hard to measure and overlooked. For Trump,
those included “Mastery at manipulating the media; Name
recognition; and A winning issue (i.e., immigration and ‘the wall’).”
Even if forecasting isn’t your hobby, there’s a lot to be learned
from studying how forecasters like Jean-Pierre form their opinions.
My colleague Phil Tetlock finds that forecasting skill is less a matter
of what we know than of how we think. When he and his
collaborators studied a host of factors that predict excellence in
forecasting, grit and ambition didn’t rise to the top. Neither did
intelligence, which came in second. There was another factor that
had roughly triple the predictive power of brainpower.
The single most important driver of forecasters’ success was how
often they updated their beliefs. The best forecasters went through
more rethinking cycles. They had the confident humility to doubt
their judgments and the curiosity to discover new information that
led them to revise their predictions.
A key question here is how much rethinking is necessary.
Although the sweet spot will always vary from one person and
situation to the next, the averages can give us a clue. A few years into
their tournaments, typical competitors updated their predictions
about twice per question. The superforecasters updated their
predictions more than four times per question.
Think about how manageable that is. Better judgment doesn’t
necessarily require hundreds or even dozens of updates. Just a few
more efforts at rethinking can move the needle. It’s also worth
noting, though, how unusual that level of rethinking is. How many of
us can even remember the last time we admitted being wrong and
revised our opinions accordingly? As journalist Kathryn Schulz
observes, “Although small amounts of evidence are sufficient to
make us draw conclusions, they are seldom sufficient to make us
revise them.”
That’s where the best forecasters excelled: they were eager to
think again. They saw their opinions more as hunches than as truths
—as possibilities to entertain rather than facts to embrace. They
questioned ideas before accepting them, and they were willing to
keep questioning them even after accepting them. They were
constantly seeking new information and better evidence—especially
disconfirming evidence.
On Seinfeld, George Costanza famously said, “It’s not a lie if you
believe it.” I might add that it doesn’t become the truth just because
you believe it. It’s a sign of wisdom to avoid believing every thought
that enters your mind. It’s a mark of emotional intelligence to avoid
internalizing every feeling that enters your heart.
Ellis Rosen/The New Yorker Collection/The Cartoon Bank
Another of the world’s top forecasters is Kjirste Morrell. She’s
obviously bright—she has a doctorate from MIT in mechanical
engineering—but her academic and professional experience wasn’t
exactly relevant to predicting world events. Her background was in
human hip joint mechanics, designing better shoes, and building
robotic wheelchairs. When I asked Kjirste what made her so good at
forecasting, she replied, “There’s no benefit to me for being wrong
for longer. It’s much better if I change my beliefs sooner, and it’s a
good feeling to have that sense of a discovery, that surprise—I would
think people would enjoy that.”
Kjirste hasn’t just figured out how to erase the pain of being
wrong. She’s transformed it into a source of pleasure. She landed
there through a form of classical conditioning, like when Pavlov’s dog
learned to salivate at the sound of a bell. If being wrong repeatedly
leads us to the right answer, the experience of being wrong itself can
become joyful.
That doesn’t mean we’ll enjoy it every step of the way. One of
Kjirste’s biggest misses was her forecast for the 2016 U.S.
presidential election, where she bet on Hillary Clinton to beat Donald
Trump. Since she wasn’t a Trump supporter, the prospect of being
wrong was painful—it was too central to her identity. She knew a
Trump presidency was possible, but she didn’t want to think it was
probable, so she couldn’t bring herself to forecast it.
That was a common mistake in 2016. Countless experts,
pollsters, and pundits underestimated Trump—and Brexit—because
they were too emotionally invested in their past predictions and
identities. If you want to be a better forecaster today, it helps to let go
of your commitment to the opinions you held yesterday. Just wake
up in the morning, snap your fingers, and decide you don’t care. It
doesn’t matter who’s president or what happens to your country.
The world is unjust and the expertise you spent decades developing
is obsolete! It’s a piece of cake, right? About as easy as willing
yourself to fall out of love. Somehow, Jean-Pierre Beugoms managed
to pull it off.
When Donald Trump first declared his candidacy in the spring of
2015, Jean-Pierre gave him only a 2 percent chance of becoming the
nominee. As Trump began rising in the August polls, Jean-Pierre was
motivated to question himself. He detached his present from his
past, acknowledging that his original prediction was understandable,
given the information he had at the time.
Detaching his opinions from his identity was harder. Jean-Pierre
didn’t want Trump to win, so it would’ve been easy to fall into the
trap of desirability bias. He overcame it by focusing on a different
goal. “I wasn’t so attached to my original forecast,” he explained,
because of “the desire to win, the desire to be the best forecaster.” He
still had a stake in the outcome he actually preferred, but he had an
even bigger stake in not making a mistake. His values put truth
above tribe: “If the evidence strongly suggests that my tribe is wrong
on a particular issue, then so be it. I consider all of my opinions
tentative. When the facts change, I change my opinions.”
Research suggests that identifying even a single reason why we
might be wrong can be enough to curb overconfidence. Jean-Pierre
went further; he made a list of all the arguments that pundits were
making about why Trump couldn’t win and went looking for
evidence that they (and he) were wrong. He found that evidence
within the polls: in contrast with widespread claims that Trump was
a factional candidate with narrow appeal, Jean-Pierre saw that
Trump was popular across key Republican demographic groups. By
mid-September, Jean-Pierre was an outlier, putting Trump’s odds of
becoming the nominee over 50 percent. “Accept the fact that you’re
going to be wrong,” Jean-Pierre advises. “Try to disprove yourself.
When you’re wrong, it’s not something to be depressed about. Say,
‘Hey, I discovered something!’”
MISTAKES WERE MADE . . . MOST LIKELY BY ME
As prescient as Jean-Pierre’s bet on Trump was, he still had trouble
sticking to it in the face of his feelings. In the spring of 2016, he
identified the media coverage of Hillary Clinton’s emails as a red flag,
and kept predicting a Trump victory for two months more. By the
summer, though, as he contemplated the impending possibility of a
Trump presidency, he found himself struggling to sleep at night. He
changed his forecast to Clinton.
Looking back, Jean-Pierre isn’t defensive about his decision. He
freely admits that despite being an experienced forecaster, he made
the rookie mistake of falling victim to desirability bias, allowing his
preference to cloud his judgment. He focused on the forces that
would enable him to predict a Clinton win because he desperately
wanted a Trump loss. “That was just a way of me trying to deal with
this unpleasant forecast I had issued,” he says. Then he does
something unexpected: he laughs at himself.
If we’re insecure, we make fun of others. If we’re comfortable
being wrong, we’re not afraid to poke fun at ourselves. Laughing at
ourselves reminds us that although we might take our decisions
seriously, we don’t have to take ourselves too seriously. Research
suggests that the more frequently we make fun of ourselves, the
happier we tend to be.* Instead of beating ourselves up about our
mistakes, we can turn some of our past misconceptions into sources
of present amusement.
Being wrong won’t always be joyful. The path to embracing
mistakes is full of painful moments, and we handle those moments
better when we remember they’re essential for progress. But if we
can’t learn to find occasional glee in discovering we were wrong, it
will be awfully hard to get anything right.
I’ve noticed a paradox in great scientists and superforecasters:
the reason they’re so comfortable being wrong is that they’re terrified
of being wrong. What sets them apart is the time horizon. They’re
determined to reach the correct answer in the long run, and they
know that means they have to be open to stumbling, backtracking,
and rerouting in the short run. They shun rose-colored glasses in
favor of a sturdy mirror. The fear of missing the mark next year is a
powerful motivator to get a crystal-clear view of last year’s mistakes.
“People who are right a lot listen a lot, and they change their mind a
lot,” Jeff Bezos says. “If you don’t change your mind frequently,
you’re going to be wrong a lot.”
Jean-Pierre Beugoms has a favorite trick for catching himself
when he’s wrong. When he makes a forecast, he also makes a list of
the conditions in which it should hold true—as well as the conditions
under which he would change his mind. He explains that this keeps
him honest, preventing him from getting attached to a bad
prediction.
What forecasters do in tournaments is good practice in life.
When you form an opinion, ask yourself what would have to happen
to prove it false. Then keep track of your views so you can see when
you were right, when you were wrong, and how your thinking has
evolved. “I started out just wanting to prove myself,” Jean-Pierre
says. “Now I want to improve myself—to see how good I can get.”
It’s one thing to admit to ourselves that we’ve been wrong. It’s
another thing to confess that to other people. Even if we manage to
overthrow our inner dictator, we run the risk of facing outer ridicule.
In some cases we fear that if others find out we were wrong, it could
destroy our reputations. How do people who accept being wrong
cope with that?
In the early 1990s, the British physicist Andrew Lyne published a
major discovery in the world’s most prestigious science journal. He
presented the first evidence that a planet could orbit a neutron star—
a star that had exploded into a supernova. Several months later,
while preparing to give a presentation at an astronomy conference,
he noticed that he hadn’t adjusted for the fact that the Earth moves
in an elliptical orbit, not a circular one. He was embarrassingly,
horribly wrong. The planet he had discovered didn’t exist.
In front of hundreds of colleagues, Andrew walked onto the
ballroom stage and admitted his mistake. When he finished his
confession, the room exploded in a standing ovation. One
astrophysicist called it “the most honorable thing I’ve ever seen.”
Andrew Lyne is not alone. Psychologists find that admitting we
were wrong doesn’t make us look less competent. It’s a display of
honesty and a willingness to learn. Although scientists believe it will
damage their reputation to admit that their studies failed to
replicate, the reverse is true: they’re judged more favorably if they
acknowledge the new data rather than deny them. After all, it doesn’t
matter “whose fault it is that something is broken if it’s your
responsibility to fix it,” actor Will Smith has said. “Taking
responsibility is taking your power back.”
When we find out we might be wrong, a standard defense is “I’m
entitled to my opinion.” I’d like to modify that: yes, we’re entitled to
hold opinions inside our own heads. If we choose to express them
out loud, though, I think it’s our responsibility to ground them in
logic and facts, share our reasoning with others, and change our
minds when better evidence emerges.
This philosophy takes us back to the Harvard students who had
their worldviews attacked in that unethical study by Henry Murray.
If I had to guess, I’d say the students who enjoyed the experience had
a mindset similar to that of great scientists and superforecasters.
They saw challenges to their opinions as an exciting opportunity to
develop and evolve their thinking. The students who found it
stressful didn’t know how to detach. Their opinions were their
identities. An assault on their worldviews was a threat to their very
sense of self. Their inner dictator rushed in to protect them.
Take it from the student with the code name Lawful. He felt he
had been damaged emotionally by the study. “Our adversary in the
debate subjected us to various insults,” Lawful reflected four decades
later. “It was a highly unpleasant experience.”
Today, Lawful has a different code name, one that’s familiar to
most Americans. He’s known as the Unabomber.
Ted Kaczynski became a math professor turned anarchist and
domestic terrorist. He mailed bombs that killed three people and
injured twenty-three more. An eighteen-year-long FBI investigation
culminated in his arrest after The New York Times and The
Washington Post published his manifesto and his brother recognized
his writing. He is now serving life in prison without parole.
The excerpt I quoted earlier was from Kaczynski’s manifesto. If
you read the entire document, you’re unlikely to be unsettled by the
content or the structure. What’s disturbing is the level of conviction.
Kaczynski displays little consideration of alternative views, barely a
hint that he might be wrong. Consider just the opening:
The Industrial Revolution and its consequences have
been a disaster for the human race. . . . They have
destabilized society, have made life unfulfilling. . . . The
continued development of technology will worsen the
situation. It will certainly subject human beings to greater
indignities and inflict greater damage on the natural
world. . . . If the system survives, the consequences will be
inevitable: There is no way of reforming or modifying the
system. . . .
Kaczynski’s case leaves many questions about his mental health
unanswered. Still, I can’t help but wonder: If he had learned to
question his opinions, would he still have been able to justify
resorting to violence? If he had developed the capacity to discover
that he was wrong, would he still have ended up doing something so
wrong?
Every time we encounter new information, we have a choice. We
can attach our opinions to our identities and stand our ground in the
stubbornness of preaching and prosecuting. Or we can operate more
like scientists, defining ourselves as people committed to the pursuit
of truth—even if it means proving our own views wrong.
CHAPTER 4
The Good Fight Club
The Psychology of Constructive Conflict
Arguments are extremely vulgar, for everybody in good
society holds exactly the same opinions.
—
A
s the two youngest boys in a big family, the bishop’s sons did
everything together. They launched a newspaper and built
their own printing press together. They opened a bicycle shop
and then started manufacturing their own bikes together. And after
years of toiling away at a seemingly impossible problem, they
invented the first successful airplane together.
Wilbur and Orville Wright first caught the flying bug when their
father brought home a toy helicopter. After it broke, they built one of
their own. As they advanced from playing together to working
together to rethinking human flight together, there was no trace of
sibling rivalry between them. Wilbur even said they “thought
together.” Even though it was Wilbur who launched the project, the
brothers shared equal credit for their achievement. When it came
time to decide who would pilot their historic flight at Kitty Hawk,
they just flipped a coin.
New ways of thinking often spring from old bonds. The comedic
chemistry of Tina Fey and Amy Poehler can be traced back to their
early twenties, when they immediately hit it off in an improv class.
The musical harmony of the Beatles started even earlier, when they
were in high school. Just minutes after a mutual friend introduced
them, Paul McCartney was teaching John Lennon how to tune a
guitar. Ben & Jerry’s Ice Cream grew out of a friendship between the
two founders that began in seventh-grade gym class. It seems that to
make progress together, we need to be in sync. But the truth, like all
truths, is more complicated.
One of the world’s leading experts on conflict is an
organizational psychologist in Australia named Karen “Etty” Jehn.
When you think about conflict, you’re probably picturing what Etty
calls relationship conflict—personal, emotional clashes that are filled
not just with friction but also with animosity. I hate your stinking
guts. I’ll use small words so that you’ll be sure to understand, you
warthog-faced buffoon. You bob for apples in the toilet . . . and you
like it.
But Etty has identified another flavor called task conflict—
clashes about ideas and opinions. We have task conflict when we’re
debating whom to hire, which restaurant to pick for dinner, or
whether to name our child Gertrude or Quasar. The question is
whether the two types of conflict have different consequences.
A few years ago I surveyed hundreds of new teams in Silicon
Valley on conflict several times during their first six months working
together. Even if they argued constantly and agreed on nothing else,
they agreed on what kind of conflict they were having. When their
projects were finished, I asked their managers to evaluate each
team’s effectiveness.
The teams that performed poorly started with more relationship
conflict than task conflict. They entered into personal feuds early on
and were so busy disliking one another that they didn’t feel
comfortable challenging one another. It took months for many of the
teams to make real headway on their relationship issues, and by the
time they did manage to debate key decisions, it was often too late to
rethink their directions.
What happened in the high-performing groups? As you might
expect, they started with low relationship conflict and kept it low
throughout their work together. That didn’t stop them from having
task conflict at the outset: they didn’t hesitate to surface competing
perspectives. As they resolved some of their differences of opinion,
they were able to align on a direction and carry out their work until
they ran into new issues to debate.
All in all, more than a hundred studies have examined conflict
types in over eight thousand teams. A meta-analysis of those studies
showed that relationship conflict is generally bad for performance,
but some task conflict can be beneficial: it’s been linked to higher
creativity and smarter choices. For example, there’s evidence that
when teams experience moderate task conflict early on, they
generate more original ideas in Chinese technology companies,
innovate more in Dutch delivery services, and make better decisions
in American hospitals. As one research team concluded, “The
absence of conflict is not harmony, it’s apathy.”
Relationship conflict is destructive in part because it stands in
the way of rethinking. When a clash gets personal and emotional, we
become self-righteous preachers of our own views, spiteful
prosecutors of the other side, or single-minded politicians who
dismiss opinions that don’t come from our side. Task conflict can be
constructive when it brings diversity of thought, preventing us from
getting trapped in overconfidence cycles. It can help us stay humble,
surface doubts, and make us curious about what we might be
missing. That can lead us to think again, moving us closer to the
truth without damaging our relationships.
Although productive disagreement is a critical life skill, it’s one
that many of us never fully develop. The problem starts early:
parents disagree behind closed doors, fearing that conflict will make
children anxious or somehow damage their character. Yet research
shows that how often parents argue has no bearing on their
children’s academic, social, or emotional development. What matters
is how respectfully parents argue, not how frequently. Kids whose
parents clash constructively feel more emotionally safe in elementary
school, and over the next few years they actually demonstrate more
helpfulness and compassion toward their classmates.
Being able to have a good fight doesn’t just make us more civil; it
also develops our creative muscles. In a classic study, highly creative
architects were more likely than their technically competent but less
original peers to come from homes with plenty of friction. They often
grew up in households that were “tense but secure,” as psychologist
Robert Albert notes: “The creative person-to-be comes from a family
that is anything but harmonious, one with a ‘wobble.’” The parents
weren’t physically or verbally abusive, but they didn’t shy away from
conflict, either. Instead of telling their children to be seen but not
heard, they encouraged them to stand up for themselves. The kids
learned to dish it out—and take it. That’s exactly what happened to
Wilbur and Orville Wright.
When the Wright brothers said they thought together, what they
really meant is that they fought together. Arguing was the family
business. Although their father was a bishop in the local church, he
included books by atheists in his library—and encouraged the
children to read and debate them. They developed the courage to
fight for their ideas and the resilience to lose a disagreement without
losing their resolve. When they were solving problems, they had
arguments that lasted not just for hours but for weeks and months at
a time. They didn’t have such incessant spats because they were
angry. They kept quarreling because they enjoyed it and learned
from the experience. “I like scrapping with Orv,” Wilbur reflected. As
you’ll see, it was one of their most passionate and prolonged
arguments that led them to rethink a critical assumption that had
prevented humans from soaring through the skies.
THE PLIGHT OF THE PEOPLE PLEASER
As long as I can remember, I’ve been determined to keep the peace.
Maybe it’s because my group of friends dropped me in middle school.
Maybe it’s genetic. Maybe it’s because my parents got divorced.
Whatever the cause, in psychology there’s a name for my affliction.
It’s called agreeableness, and it’s one of the major personality traits
around the world. Agreeable people tend to be nice. Friendly. Polite.
Canadian.*
My first impulse is to avoid even the most trivial of conflicts.
When I’m riding in an Uber and the air-conditioning is blasting, I
struggle to bring myself to ask the driver to turn it down—I just sit
there shivering in silence until my teeth start to chatter. When
someone steps on my shoe, I’ve actually apologized for
inconveniently leaving my foot in his path. When students fill out
course evaluations, one of their most common complaints is that I’m
“too supportive of stupid comments.”
Disagreeable people tend to be more critical, skeptical, and
challenging—and they’re more likely than their peers to become
engineers and lawyers. They’re not just comfortable with conflict; it
energizes them. If you’re highly disagreeable, you might be happier
in an argument than in a friendly conversation. That quality often
comes with a bad rap: disagreeable people get stereotyped as
curmudgeons who complain about every idea, or Dementors who
suck the joy out of every meeting. When I studied Pixar, though, I
came away with a dramatically different view.
In 2000, Pixar was on fire. Their teams had used computers to
rethink animation in their first blockbuster, Toy Story, and they
were fresh off two more smash hits. Yet the company’s founders
weren’t content to rest on their laurels. They recruited an outside
director named Brad Bird to shake things up. Brad had just released
his debut film, which was well reviewed but flopped at the box office,
so he was itching to do something big and bold. When he pitched his
vision, the technical leadership at Pixar said it was impossible: they
would need a decade and $500 million to make it.
Brad wasn’t ready to give up. He sought out the biggest misfits at
Pixar for his project—people who were disagreeable, disgruntled, and
dissatisfied. Some called them black sheep. Others called them
pirates. When Brad rounded them up, he warned them that no one
believed they could pull off the project. Just four years later, his team
didn’t only succeed in releasing Pixar’s most complex film ever; they
actually managed to lower the cost of production per minute. The
Incredibles went on to gross upwards of $631 million worldwide and
won the Oscar for Best Animated Feature.
Notice what Brad didn’t do. He didn’t stock his team with
agreeable people. Agreeable people make for a great support
network: they’re excited to encourage us and cheerlead for us.
Rethinking depends on a different kind of network: a challenge
network, a group of people we trust to point out our blind spots and
help us overcome our weaknesses. Their role is to activate rethinking
cycles by pushing us to be humble about our expertise, doubt our
knowledge, and be curious about new perspectives.
The ideal members of a challenge network are disagreeable,
because they’re fearless about questioning the way things have
always been done and holding us accountable for thinking again.
There’s evidence that disagreeable people speak up more frequently
—especially when leaders aren’t receptive—and foster more task
conflict. They’re like the doctor in the show House or the boss in the
film The Devil Wears Prada. They give the critical feedback we
might not want to hear, but need to hear.
Harnessing disagreeable people isn’t always easy. It helps if
certain conditions are in place. Studies in oil drilling and tech
companies suggest that dissatisfaction promotes creativity only when
people feel committed and supported—and that cultural misfits are
most likely to add value when they have strong bonds with their
colleagues.*
Before Brad Bird arrived, Pixar already had a track record of
encouraging talented people to push boundaries. But the studio’s
previous films had starred toys, bugs, and monsters, which were
relatively simple to animate. Since making a whole film with lifelike
human superheroes was beyond the capabilities of computer
animation at the time, the technical teams balked at Brad’s vision for
The Incredibles. That’s when he created his challenge network. He
enlisted his band of pirates to foster task conflict and rethink the
process.
Brad gathered the pirates in Pixar’s theater and told them that
although a bunch of bean counters and corporate suits might not
believe in them, he did. After rallying them he went out of his way to
seek out their ideas. “I want people who are disgruntled because they
have a better way of doing things and they are having trouble finding
an avenue,” Brad told me. “Racing cars that are just spinning their
wheels in a garage rather than racing. You open that garage door,
and man, those people will take you somewhere.” The pirates rose to
the occasion, finding economical alternatives to expensive
techniques and easy workarounds for hard problems. When it came
time to animate the superhero family, they didn’t toil over the
intricate contours of interlocking muscles. Instead they figured out
that sliding simple oval shapes against one another could become the
building blocks of complex muscles.
When I asked Brad how he recognized the value of pirates, he
told me it was because he is one. Growing up, when he went to
dinner at friends’ houses, he was taken aback by the polite questions
their parents asked about their day at school. Bird family dinners
were more like a food fight, where they all vented, debated, and
spoke their minds. Brad found the exchanges contentious but fun,
and he brought that mentality into his first dream job at Disney.
From an early age, he had been mentored and trained by a group of
old Disney masters to put quality first, and he was frustrated that
their replacements—who now supervised the new generation at the
studio—weren’t upholding the same standards. Within a few months
of launching his animation career at Disney, Brad was criticizing
senior leaders for taking on conventional projects and producing
substandard work. They told him to be quiet and do his job. When he
refused, they fired him.
I’ve watched too many leaders shield themselves from task
conflict. As they gain power, they tune out boat-rockers and listen to
bootlickers. They become politicians, surrounding themselves with
agreeable yes-men and becoming more susceptible to seduction by
sycophants. Research reveals that when their firms perform poorly,
CEOs who indulge flattery and conformity become overconfident.
They stick to their existing strategic plans instead of changing course
—which sets them on a collision course with failure.
We learn more from people who challenge our thought process
than those who affirm our conclusions. Strong leaders engage their
critics and make themselves stronger. Weak leaders silence their
critics and make themselves weaker. This reaction isn’t limited to
people in power. Although we might be on board with the principle,
in practice we often miss out on the value of a challenge network.
In one experiment, when people were criticized rather than
praised by a partner, they were over four times more likely to request
a new partner. Across a range of workplaces, when employees
received tough feedback from colleagues, their default response was
to avoid those coworkers or drop them from their networks
altogether—and their performance suffered over the following year.
Some organizations and occupations counter those tendencies by
building challenge networks into their cultures. From time to time
the Pentagon and the White House have used aptly named “murder
boards” to stir up task conflict, enlisting tough-minded committees
to shoot down plans and candidates. At X, Google’s “moonshot
factory,” there’s a rapid evaluation team that’s charged with
rethinking proposals: members conduct independent assessments
and only advance the ones that emerge as both audacious and
achievable. In science, a challenge network is often a cornerstone of
the peer-review process. We submit articles anonymously, and
they’re reviewed blindly by independent experts. I’ll never forget the
rejection letter I once received in which one of the reviewers
encouraged me to go back and read the work of Adam Grant. Dude, I
am Adam Grant.
When I write a book, I like to enlist my own challenge network. I
recruit a group of my most thoughtful critics and ask them to tear
each chapter apart. I’ve learned that it’s important to consider their
values along with their personalities—I’m looking for disagreeable
people who are givers, not takers. Disagreeable givers often make the
best critics: their intent is to elevate the work, not feed their own
egos. They don’t criticize because they’re insecure; they challenge
because they care. They dish out tough love.*
Ernest Hemingway once said, “The most essential gift for a good
writer is a built-in, shock-proof sh*t detector.” My challenge network
is my sh*t detector. I think of it as a good fight club. The first rule:
avoiding an argument is bad manners. Silence disrespects the value
of your views and our ability to have a civil disagreement.
Brad Bird lives by that rule. He has legendary arguments with his
long-standing producer, John Walker. When making The
Incredibles, they fought about every character detail, right down to
their hair—from how receding the hairline should be on the
superhero dad to whether the teenage daughter’s hair should be long
and flowing. At one point, Brad wanted the baby to morph into goo,
taking on a jellylike shape, but John put his foot down. It would be
too difficult to animate, and they were too far behind schedule. “I’m
just trying to herd you toward the finish,” John said, laughing. “I’m
just trying to get us across the line, man.” Pounding his fist, Brad
shot back: “I’m trying to get us across the line in first place.”
Eventually John talked Brad out of it, and the goo was gone. “I
love working with John, because he’ll give me the bad news straight
to my face,” Brad says. “It’s good that we disagree. It’s good that we
fight it out. It makes the stuff stronger.”
Those fights have helped Brad win two Oscars—and made him a
better learner and a better leader. For John’s part, he didn’t flat-out
refuse to animate a gooey baby. He just told Brad he would have to
wait a little bit. Sure enough, when they got around to releasing a
sequel to The Incredibles fourteen years later, the baby got into a
fight with a raccoon and transformed into goo. That scene might be
the hardest I’ve ever seen my kids laugh.
DON’T AGREE TO DISAGREE
Hashing out competing views has potential downsides—risks that
need to be managed. On the first Incredibles film, a rising star
named Nicole Grindle had managed the simulation of the hair,
watching John and Brad’s interactions from a distance. When Nicole
came in to produce the sequel with John, one of her concerns was
that the volume of the arguments between the two highly
accomplished leaders might drown out the voices of people who were
less comfortable speaking up: newcomers, introverts, women, and
minorities. It’s common for people who lack power or status to shift
into politician mode, suppressing their dissenting views in favor of
conforming to the HIPPO—the HIghest Paid Person’s Opinion.
Sometimes they have no other choice if they want to survive.
To make sure their desire for approval didn’t prevent them from
introducing task conflict, Nicole encouraged new people to bring
their divergent ideas to the table. Some voiced them directly to the
group; others went to her for feedback and support. Although Nicole
wasn’t a pirate, as she found herself advocating for different
perspectives she became more comfortable challenging Brad on
characters and dialogue. “Brad is still the ornery guy who first came
to Pixar, so you have to be ready for a spirited debate when you put
forward a contrary point of view.”
The notion of a spirited debate captures something important
about how and why good fights happen. If you watch Brad argue with
his colleagues—or the pirates fight with one another—you can
quickly see that the tension is intellectual, not emotional. The tone is
vigorous and feisty rather than combative or aggressive. They don’t
disagree just for the sake of it; they disagree because they care.
“Whether you disagree loudly, or quietly yet persistently put forward
a different perspective,” Nicole explains, “we come together to
support the common goal of excellence—of making great films.”
After seeing their interactions up close, I finally understood what
had long felt like a contradiction in my own personality: how I could
be highly agreeable and still cherish a good argument. Agreeableness
is about seeking social harmony, not cognitive consensus. It’s
possible to disagree without being disagreeable. Although I’m
terrified of hurting other people’s feelings, when it comes to
challenging their thoughts, I have no fear. In fact, when I argue with
someone, it’s not a display of disrespect—it’s a sign of respect. It
means I value their views enough to contest them. If their opinions
didn’t matter to me, I wouldn’t bother. I know I have chemistry with
someone when we find it delightful to prove each other wrong.
Agreeable people don’t always steer clear of conflict. They’re
highly attuned to the people around them and often adapt to the
norms in the room. My favorite demonstration is an experiment by
my colleagues Jennifer Chatman and Sigal Barsade. Agreeable
people were significantly more accommodating than disagreeable
ones—as long as they were in a cooperative team. When they were
assigned to a competitive team, they acted just as disagreeably as
their disagreeable teammates.
That’s how working with Brad Bird influenced John Walker.
John’s natural tendency is to avoid conflict: at restaurants, if the
waiter brings him the wrong dish, he just goes ahead and eats it
anyway. “But when I’m involved in something bigger than myself,”
he observes, “I feel like I have an opportunity, a responsibility really,
to speak up, speak out, debate. Fight like hell when the morning
whistle blows, but go out for a beer after the one at five o’clock.”
That adaptability was also visible in the Wright brothers’
relationship. In Wilbur, Orville had a built-in challenge network.
Wilbur was known to be highly disagreeable: he was unfazed by
other people’s opinions and had a habit of pouncing on anyone else’s
idea the moment it was raised. Orville was known as gentle, cheerful,
and sensitive to criticism. Yet those qualities seemed to vanish in his
partnership with his brother. “He’s such a good scrapper,” Wilbur
said. One sleepless night Orville came up with an idea to build a
rudder that was movable rather than fixed. The next morning at
breakfast, as he got ready to pitch the idea to Wilbur, Orville winked
at a colleague of theirs, expecting Wilbur to go into challenge mode
and demolish it. Much to his surprise, Wilbur saw the potential in
the idea immediately, and it became one of their major discoveries.
Disagreeable people don’t just challenge us to think again. They
also make agreeable people comfortable arguing, too. Instead of
fleeing from friction, our grumpy colleagues engage it directly. By
making it clear that they can handle a tussle, they create a norm for
the rest of us to follow. If we’re not careful, though, what starts as a
scuffle can turn into a brawl. How can we avoid that slippery slope?
GETTING HOT WITHOUT GETTING MAD
A major problem with task conflict is that it often spills over into
relationship conflict. One minute you’re disagreeing about how much
seasoning to put on the Thanksgiving turkey, and the next minute
you find yourself yelling “You smell!”
Although the Wright brothers had a lifetime of experience
discovering each other’s hot buttons, that didn’t mean they always
kept their cool. Their last grand challenge before liftoff was their
single hardest problem: designing a propeller. They knew their
airplane couldn’t take flight without one, but the right kind didn’t
exist. As they struggled with various approaches, they argued back
and forth for hours at a time, often raising their voices. The feuding
lasted for months as each took turns preaching the merits of his own
solutions and prosecuting the other’s points. Eventually their
younger sister, Katharine, threatened to leave the house if they didn’t
stop fighting. They kept at it anyway, until one night it culminated in
what might have been the loudest shouting match of their lives.
Strangely, the next morning, they came into the shop and acted
as if nothing had happened. They picked up the argument about the
propeller right where they had left off—only now without the yelling.
Soon they were both rethinking their assumptions and stumbling
onto what would become one of their biggest breakthroughs.
The Wright brothers were masters at having intense task conflict
without relationship conflict. When they raised their voices, it
reflected intensity rather than hostility. As their mechanic marveled,
“I don’t think they really got mad, but they sure got awfully hot.”
Experiments show that simply framing a dispute as a debate
rather than as a disagreement signals that you’re receptive to
considering dissenting opinions and changing your mind, which in
turn motivates the other person to share more information with you.
A disagreement feels personal and potentially hostile; we expect a
debate to be about ideas, not emotions. Starting a disagreement by
asking, “Can we debate?” sends a message that you want to think like
a scientist, not a preacher or a prosecutor—and encourages the other
person to think that way, too.
The Wright brothers had the benefit of growing up in a family
where disagreements were seen as productive and enjoyable. When
arguing with others, though, they often had to go out of their way to
reframe their behavior. “Honest argument is merely a process of
mutually picking the beams and motes out of each other’s eyes so
both can see clearly,” Wilbur once wrote to a colleague whose ego
was bruised after a fiery exchange about aeronautics. Wilbur stressed
that it wasn’t personal: he saw arguments as opportunities to test
and refine their thinking. “I see that you are back at your old trick of
giving up before you are half beaten in an argument. I feel pretty
certain of my own ground but was anticipating the pleasure of a good
scrap before the matter was settled. Discussion brings out new ways
of looking at things.”
When they argued about the propeller, the Wright brothers were
making a common mistake. Each was preaching about why he was
right and why the other was wrong. When we argue about why, we
run the risk of becoming emotionally attached to our positions and
dismissive of the other side’s. We’re more likely to have a good fight
if we argue about how.
When social scientists asked people why they favor particular
policies on taxes, health care, or nuclear sanctions, they often
doubled down on their convictions. Asking people to explain how
those policies would work in practice—or how they’d explain them to
an expert—activated a rethinking cycle. They noticed gaps in their
knowledge, doubted their conclusions, and became less extreme;
they were now more curious about alternative options.
Psychologists find that many of us are vulnerable to an illusion of
explanatory depth. Take everyday objects like a bicycle, a piano, or
earbuds: how well do you understand them? People tend to be
overconfident in their knowledge: they believe they know much more
than they actually do about how these objects work. We can help
them see the limits of their understanding by asking them to unpack
the mechanisms. How do the gears on a bike work? How does a
piano key make music? How do earbuds transmit sound from your
phone to your ears? People are surprised by how much they struggle
to answer those questions and quickly realize how little they actually
know. That’s what happened to the Wright brothers after their
yelling match.
The next morning, the Wright brothers approached the propeller
problem differently. Orville showed up at the shop first and told their
mechanic that he had been wrong: they should design the propeller
Wilbur’s way. Then Wilbur arrived and started arguing against his
own idea, suggesting that Orville might be right.
As they shifted into scientist mode, they focused less on why
different solutions would succeed or fail, and more on how those
solutions might work. Finally they identified problems with both of
their approaches, and realized they were both wrong. “We worked
out a theory of our own on the subject, and soon discovered,” Orville
wrote, “that all the propellers built heretofore are all wrong.” He
exclaimed that their new design was “all right (till we have a chance
to test them down at Kitty Hawk and find out differently).”
Even after building a better solution, they were still open to
rethinking it. At Kitty Hawk, they found that it was indeed the right
one. The Wright brothers had figured out that their airplane didn’t
need a propeller. It needed two propellers, spinning in opposite
directions, to function like a rotating wing.
That’s the beauty of task conflict. In a great argument, our
adversary is not a foil, but a propeller. With twin propellers spinning
in divergent directions, our thinking doesn’t get stuck on the ground;
it takes flight.
PART II
Interpersonal Rethinking
Opening Other People’s Minds
CHAPTER 5
Dances with Foes
How to Win Debates and Influence People
Exhausting someone in argument is not the same as
convincing him.
—
A
t thirty-one, Harish Natarajan has won three dozen
international debate tournaments. He’s been told it’s a world
record. But his opponent today presents a unique challenge.
Debra Jo Prectet is a prodigy hailing from Haifa, Israel. She’s
just eight years old, and although she made her first foray into public
debating only last summer, she’s been preparing for this moment for
years. Debra has absorbed countless articles to accumulate
knowledge, closely studied speechwriting to hone her clarity, and
even practiced her delivery to incorporate humor. Now she’s ready to
challenge the champion himself. Her parents are hoping she’ll make
history.
Harish was a wunderkind too. By the time he was eight, he was
outmaneuvering his own parents in dinner-table debates about the
Indian caste system. He went on to become the European debate
champion and a grand finalist in the world debate championship,
and coached the Filipino national school debate team at the world
championship. I was introduced to Harish by an unusually bright
former student who used to compete against him, and remembers
having lost “many (likely all)” of their debates.
Harish and Debra are facing off in San Francisco in February
2019 in front of a large crowd. They’ve been kept in the dark about
the debate topic. When they walk onstage, the moderator announces
the subject: should preschools be subsidized by the government?
After just fifteen minutes of preparation, Debra will present her
strongest arguments in favor of subsidies, and Harish will marshal
his best case against them. Their goal is to win the audience over to
their side on preschool subsidies, but their impact on me will be
much broader: they’ll end up changing my view of what it takes to
win a debate.
Debra kicks off with a joke, drawing laughter from the crowd by
telling Harish that although he may hold the world record in debate
wins, he’s never debated someone like her. Then she goes on to
summarize an impressive number of studies—citing her sources—
about the academic, social, and professional benefits of preschool
programs. For good measure, she quotes a former prime minister’s
argument about preschool being a smart investment.
Harish acknowledges the facts that Debra presented, but then
makes his case that subsidizing preschools is not the appropriate
remedy for the damage caused by poverty. He suggests that the issue
should be evaluated on two grounds: whether preschool is currently
underprovided and underconsumed, and whether it helps those who
are the least fortunate. He argues that in a world full of trade-offs,
subsidizing preschool is not the best use of taxpayer money.
Going into the debate, 92 percent of the audience has already
made up their minds. I’m one of them: it didn’t take me long to
figure out where I stood on preschool subsidies. In the United States,
public education is free from kindergarten through high school. I’m
familiar with evidence that early access to education in the first few
years of children’s lives may be even more critical to helping them
escape poverty than anything they learn later. I believe education is a
fundamental human right, like access to water, food, shelter, and
health care. That puts me on Team Debra. As I watch the debate, her
early arguments strike a chord. Here are some highlights:
Debra: Research clearly shows that a good preschool can
help kids overcome the disadvantages often associated with
poverty.
Data for the win! Be still, my beating heart.
Debra: You will possibly hear my opponent talk today
about different priorities . . . he might say that subsidies are
needed, but not for preschools. I would like to ask you, Mr.
Natarajan . . . why don’t we examine the evidence and the
data and decide accordingly?
If Harish has an Achilles’ heel, my former student has told me, it’s
that his brilliant arguments aren’t always grounded in facts.
Harish: Let me start by examining the main claim . . . that
if we believe preschools are good in principle, surely it is
worth giving money to subsidize those—but I don’t think
that is ever enough of a justification for subsidies.
Debra has clearly done her homework. She didn’t just nail Harish on
data—she anticipated his counterargument.
Debra: The state budget is a big one, and there is room in it
to subsidize preschools and invest in other fields. Therefore,
the idea that there are more important things to spend on is
irrelevant, because the different subsidies are not mutually
exclusive.
Way to debunk Harish’s case for trade-offs. Bravo.
Harish: Maybe the state has the budget to do all the good
things. Maybe the state has the budget to provide health
care. Maybe it has the budget to provide welfare payments.
Maybe it has the budget to provide running water as well as
preschool. I would love to live in that world, but I don’t think
that is the world we live in. I think we live in a world where
there are real constraints on what governments can spend
money on—and even if those are not real, those are
nonetheless political.
D’oh! Valid point. Even if a program has the potential to pay for
itself, it takes a lot of political capital to make it happen—capital that
could be invested elsewhere.
Debra: Giving opportunities to the less fortunate should be
a moral obligation of any human being, and it is a key role
for the state. To be clear, we should find the funding for
preschools and not rely on luck or market forces. This issue
is too important to not have a safety net.
Yes! This is more than a political or an economic question. It’s a
moral question.
Harish: I want to start by noting what [we] agree on. We
agree that poverty is terrible. It is terrible when individuals
do not have running water. It is terrible when . . . they are
struggling to feed their family. It is terrible when they
cannot get health care. . . . That is all terrible, and those are
all things we need to address, and none of those are
addressed just because you are going to subsidize preschool.
Why is that the case?
Hmm. Can Debra argue otherwise?
Debra: Universal full-day preschool creates significant
economic savings in health care as well as decreased crime,
welfare dependence, and child abuse.
Harish: High-quality preschools will reduce crime. Maybe,
but so would other measures in terms of crime prevention.
Debra: High-quality preschool boosts high school
graduation rates.
Harish: High-quality preschools can lead to huge
improvements in individuals’ lives. Maybe, but I’m not sure
if you massively increase the number of people going to
preschool, they’re all gonna be the ones going to the highquality preschools.
Uh-oh. Harish is right: there’s a risk that children from the poorest
families will end up in the worst preschools. I’m starting to rethink
my position.
Harish: Even when you subsidize preschools, it doesn’t
mean that all individuals go. . . . The question is, who do you
help? And the people you don’t help are those individuals
who are the poorest. You give unfair and exaggerated gains
to those individuals who are in the middle class.
Point taken. Since preschool won’t be free, the underprivileged still
might not be able to afford it. Now I’m torn about where I stand.
You’ve seen arguments from both sides. Before I tell you who
won, consider your own position: what was your opinion of
preschool subsidies going into the debate, and how many times did
you end up rethinking that opinion?
If you’re like me, you reconsidered your views multiple times.
Changing your mind doesn’t make you a flip-flopper or a hypocrite.
It means you were open to learning.
Looking back, I’m disappointed in myself for forming an opinion
before the debate even started. Sure, I’d read some research on early
child development, but I was clueless about the economics of
subsidies and the alternative ways those funds could be invested.
Note to self: on my next trip to the top of Mount Stupid, remember
to take a selfie.
In the audience poll after the debate, the number of undecided
people was the same, but the balance of opinion shifted away from
Debra’s position, toward Harish’s. Support for preschool subsidies
dropped from 79 to 62 percent, and opposition more than doubled
from 13 to 30 percent. Debra not only had more data, better
evidence, and more evocative imagery—she had the audience on her
side going into the debate. Yet Harish convinced a number of us to
rethink our positions. How did he do it, and what can we learn from
him about the art of debate?
This section of the book is about convincing other people to
rethink their opinions. When we’re trying to persuade people, we
frequently take an adversarial approach. Instead of opening their
minds, we effectively shut them down or rile them up. They play
defense by putting up a shield, play offense by preaching their
perspectives and prosecuting ours, or play politics by telling us what
we want to hear without changing what they actually think. I want to
explore a more collaborative approach—one in which we show more
humility and curiosity, and invite others to think more like scientists.
THE SCIENCE OF THE DEAL
A few years ago a former student named Jamie called me for advice
on where to go to business school. Since she was already well on her
way to building a successful career, I told her it was a waste of time
and money. I walked her through the lack of evidence that a graduate
degree would make a tangible difference in her future, and the risk
that she’d end up overqualified and underexperienced. When she
insisted that her employer expected an MBA for promotions, I told
her that I knew of exceptions and pointed out that she probably
wouldn’t spend her whole career at that firm anyway. Finally, she hit
back: “You’re a logic bully!”
A what?
“A logic bully,” Jamie repeated. “You just overwhelmed me with
rational arguments, and I don’t agree with them, but I can’t fight
back.”
At first I was delighted by the label. It felt like a solid description
of one of my roles as a social scientist: to win debates with the best
data. Then Jamie explained that my approach wasn’t actually
helpful. The more forcefully I argued, the more she dug in her heels.
Suddenly I realized I had instigated that same kind of resistance
many times before.
David Sipress/The New Yorker Collection/The Cartoon Bank; © Condé Nast
Growing up, I was taught by my karate sensei never to start a
fight unless I was prepared to be the only one standing at the end.
That’s how I approached debates at work and with friends: I thought
the key to victory was to go into battle armed with airtight logic and
rigorous data. The harder I attacked, though, the harder my
opponents fought back. I was laser-focused on convincing them to
accept my views and rethink theirs, but I was coming across like a
preacher and a prosecutor. Although those mindsets sometimes
motivated me to persist in making my points, I often ended up
alienating my audience. I was not winning.
For centuries, debating has been prized as an art form, but
there’s now a growing science of how to do it well. In a formal debate
your goal is to change the mind of your audience. In an informal
debate, you’re trying to change the mind of your conversation
partner. That’s a kind of negotiation, where you’re trying to reach an
agreement about the truth. To build my knowledge and skills about
how to win debates, I studied the psychology of negotiations and
eventually used what I’d learned to teach bargaining skills to leaders
across business and government. I came away convinced that my
instincts—and what I’d learned in karate—were dead wrong.
A good debate is not a war. It’s not even a tug-of-war, where you
can drag your opponent to your side if you pull hard enough on the
rope. It’s more like a dance that hasn’t been choreographed,
negotiated with a partner who has a different set of steps in mind. If
you try too hard to lead, your partner will resist. If you can adapt
your moves to hers, and get her to do the same, you’re more likely to
end up in rhythm.
In a classic study, a team of researchers led by Neil Rackham
examined what expert negotiators do differently. They recruited one
group of average negotiators and another group of highly skilled
ones, who had significant track records of success and had been
rated as effective by their counterparts. To compare the participants’
techniques, they recorded both groups doing labor and contract
negotiations.
In a war, our goal is to gain ground rather than lose it, so we’re
often afraid to surrender a few battles. In a negotiation, agreeing
with someone else’s argument is disarming. The experts recognized
that in their dance they couldn’t stand still and expect the other
person to make all the moves. To get in harmony, they needed to step
back from time to time.
One difference was visible before anyone even arrived at the
bargaining table. Prior to the negotiations, the researchers
interviewed both groups about their plans. The average negotiators
went in armed for battle, hardly taking note of any anticipated areas
of agreement. The experts, in contrast, mapped out a series of dance
steps they might be able to take with the other side, devoting more
than a third of their planning comments to finding common ground.
As the negotiators started discussing options and making
proposals, a second difference emerged. Most people think of
arguments as being like a pair of scales: the more reasons we can pile
up on our side, the more it will tip the balance in our favor. Yet the
experts did the exact opposite: They actually presented fewer reasons
to support their case. They didn’t want to water down their best
points. As Rackham put it, “A weak argument generally dilutes a
strong one.”
The more reasons we put on the table, the easier it is for people
to discard the shakiest one. Once they reject one of our justifications,
they can easily dismiss our entire case. That happened regularly to
the average negotiators: they brought too many different weapons to
battle. They lost ground not because of the strength of their most
compelling point, but because of the weakness of their least
compelling one.
These habits led to a third contrast: the average negotiators were
more likely to enter into defend-attack spirals. They dismissively
shot down their opponents’ proposals and doubled down on their
own positions, which prevented both sides from opening their
minds. The skilled negotiators rarely went on offense or defense.
Instead, they expressed curiosity with questions like “So you don’t
see any merit in this proposal at all?”
Questions were the fourth difference between the two groups. Of
every five comments the experts made, at least one ended in a
question mark. They appeared less assertive, but much like in a
dance, they led by letting their partners step forward.
Recent experiments show that having even one negotiator who
brings a scientist’s level of humility and curiosity improves outcomes
for both parties, because she will search for more information and
discover ways to make both sides better off. She isn’t telling her
counterparts what to think. She’s asking them to dance. Which is
exactly what Harish Natarajan does in a debate.
DANCING TO THE SAME BEAT
Since the audience started out favoring preschool subsidies, there
was more room for change in Harish’s direction—but he also had the
more difficult task of advocating for the unpopular position. He
opened the audience’s mind by taking a page out of the playbook of
expert negotiators.
Harish started by emphasizing common ground. When he took
the stage for his rebuttal, he immediately drew attention to his and
Debra’s areas of agreement. “So,” he began, “I think we disagree on
far less than it may seem.” He called out their alignment on the
problem of poverty—and on the validity of some of the studies—
before objecting to subsidies as a solution.
We won’t have much luck changing other people’s minds if we
refuse to change ours. We can demonstrate openness by
acknowledging where we agree with our critics and even what we’ve
learned from them. Then, when we ask what views they might be
willing to revise, we’re not hypocrites.
Convincing other people to think again isn’t just about making a
good argument—it’s about establishing that we have the right
motives in doing so. When we concede that someone else has made a
good point, we signal that we’re not preachers, prosecutors, or
politicians trying to advance an agenda. We’re scientists trying to get
to the truth. “Arguments are often far more combative and
adversarial than they need to be,” Harish told me. “You should be
willing to listen to what someone else is saying and give them a lot of
credit for it. It makes you sound like a reasonable person who is
taking everything into account.”
Being reasonable literally means that we can be reasoned with,
that we’re open to evolving our views in light of logic and data. So in
the debate with Harish, why did Debra neglect to do that—why did
she overlook common ground?
It’s not because Debra is eight years old. It’s because she isn’t
human.
Debra Jo Prectet is an anagram I invented. Her official name is
Project Debater, and she’s a machine. More specifically, an artificial
intelligence developed by IBM to do for debate what Watson did for
chess.
They first dreamed the idea up in 2011 and started working
intensively on it in 2014. Just a few years later, Project Debater had
developed the remarkable ability to conduct an intelligent debate in
public, complete with facts, coherent sentences, and even
counterarguments. Her knowledge corpus consists of 400 million
articles, largely from credible newspapers and magazines, and her
claim detection engine is designed to locate key arguments, identify
their boundaries, and weigh the evidence. For any debate topic, she
can instantaneously search her knowledge graph for relevant data
points, mold them into a logical case, and deliver it clearly—even
entertainingly—in a female voice within the time constraints. Her
first words in the preschool subsidy debate were, “Greetings, Harish.
I’ve heard you hold the world record in debate competition wins
against humans, but I suspect you’ve never debated a machine.
Welcome to the future.”
Of course, it’s possible that Harish won because the audience
was biased against the computer and rooting for the human. It’s
worth noting, though, that Harish’s approach in that debate is the
same one that he’s used to defeat countless humans on international
stages. What amazes me is that the computer was able to master
multiple complex capabilities while completely missing this crucial
one.
After studying 10 billion sentences, a computer was able to say
something funny—a skill that’s normally thought to be confined to
sentient beings with high levels of social and emotional intelligence.
The computer had learned to make a logical argument and even
anticipate the other side’s counterargument. Yet it hadn’t learned to
agree with elements of the other side’s argument, apparently because
that behavior was all too rarely deployed across 400 million articles
by humans. They were usually too busy preaching their arguments,
prosecuting their enemies, or politicking for audience support to
grant a valid point from the other side.
When I asked Harish how to improve at finding common
ground, he offered a surprisingly practical tip. Most people
immediately start with a straw man, poking holes in the weakest
version of the other side’s case. He does the reverse: he considers the
strongest version of their case, which is known as the steel man. A
politician might occasionally adopt that tactic to pander or persuade,
but like a good scientist, Harish does it to learn. Instead of trying to
dismantle the argument that preschool is good for kids, Harish
accepted that the point was valid, which allowed him to relate to his
opponent’s perspective—and to the audience’s. Then it was perfectly
fair and balanced for him to express his concerns about whether a
subsidy would give the most underprivileged kids access to
preschool.
Drawing attention to common ground and avoiding defendattack spirals weren’t the only ways in which Harish resembled
expert negotiators. He was also careful not to come on too strong.
DON’T STEP ON THEIR TOES
Harish’s next advantage stemmed from one of his disadvantages. He
would never have access to as many facts as the computer. When the
audience was polled afterward about who taught them more, the
overwhelming majority said they learned more from the computer
than from Harish. But it was Harish who succeeded in swaying their
opinions. Why?
The computer piled on study after study to support a long list of
reasons in favor of preschool subsidies. Like a skilled negotiator,
Harish focused on just two reasons against them. He knew that
making too many points could come at the cost of developing,
elaborating, and reinforcing his best ones. “If you have too many
arguments, you’ll dilute the power of each and every one,” he told
me. “They are going to be less well explained, and I don’t know if any
of them will land enough—I don’t think the audience will believe
them to be important enough. Most top debaters aren’t citing a lot of
information.”
Is this always the best way to approach a debate? The answer is—
like pretty much everything else in social science—it depends. The
ideal number of reasons varies from one circumstance to another.
There are times when preaching and prosecuting can make us
more persuasive. Research suggests that the effectiveness of these
approaches hinges on three key factors: how much people care about
the issue, how open they are to our particular argument, and how
strong-willed they are in general. If they’re not invested in the issue
or they’re receptive to our perspective, more reasons can help: people
tend to see quantity as a sign of quality. The more the topic matters
to them, the more the quality of reasons matters. It’s when audiences
are skeptical of our view, have a stake in the issue, and tend to be
stubborn that piling on justifications is most likely to backfire. If
they’re resistant to rethinking, more reasons simply give them more
ammunition to shoot our views down.
It’s not just about the number of reasons, though. It’s also how
they fit together. A university once approached me to see if I could
bring in donations from alumni who had never given a dime. My
colleagues and I ran an experiment testing two different messages
meant to convince thousands of resistant alumni to give. One
message emphasized the opportunity to do good: donating would
benefit students, faculty, and staff. The other emphasized the
opportunity to feel good: donors would enjoy the warm glow of
giving.
The two messages were equally effective: in both cases, 6.5
percent of the stingy alumni ended up donating. Then we combined
them, because two reasons are better than one.
Except they weren’t. When we put the two reasons together, the
giving rate dropped below 3 percent. Each reason alone was more
than twice as effective as the two combined.
The audience was already skeptical. When we gave them
different kinds of reasons to donate, we triggered their awareness
that someone was trying to persuade them—and they shielded
themselves against it. A single line of argument feels like a
conversation; multiple lines of argument can become an onslaught.
The audience tuned out the preacher and summoned their best
defense attorney to refute the prosecutor.
As important as the quantity and quality of reasons might be, the
source matters, too. And the most convincing source is often the one
closest to your audience.
A student in one of my classes, Rachel Breuhaus, noticed that
although top college basketball teams have rabid fans, there are
usually empty seats in their arenas. To study strategies for
motivating more fans to show up, we launched an experiment in the
week before an upcoming game targeting hundreds of season ticket
holders. When left to their own devices, 77 percent of these
supposedly die-hard fans actually made it to the game. We decided
that the most persuasive message would come from the team itself,
so we sent fans an email with quotes from players and coaches about
how part of the home-court advantage stems from the energy of a
packed house of cheering fans. It had no effect whatsoever:
attendance in that group was 76 percent.
What did move the needle was an email with a different
approach. We simply asked fans one question: are you planning to
attend? Attendance climbed to 85 percent. The question gave fans
the freedom to make their own case for going.
Psychologists have long found that the person most likely to
persuade you to change your mind is you. You get to pick the reasons
you find most compelling, and you come away with a real sense of
ownership over them.
That’s where Harish’s final edge came in. In every round he
posed more questions to contemplate. The computer spoke in
declarative sentences, asking just a single question in the opening
statement—and directing it at Harish, rather than at the audience. In
his opening, Harish asked six different questions for the audience to
ponder. Within the first minute, he asserted that just because
preschools are good doesn’t mean that they should be funded by the
government, and then inquired, “Why is that the case?” He went on
to ask whether preschools were underprovided, whether they did
help the most disadvantaged—and then why they didn’t, why they
were so costly, and who they actually helped instead.
Taken together, these techniques increase the odds that during a
disagreement, other people will abandon an overconfidence cycle
and engage in a rethinking cycle. When we point out that there are
areas where we agree and acknowledge that they have some valid
points, we model confident humility and encourage them to follow
suit. When we support our argument with a small number of
cohesive, compelling reasons, we encourage them to start doubting
their own opinion. And when we ask genuine questions, we leave
them intrigued to learn more. We don’t have to convince them that
we’re right—we just need to open their minds to the possibility that
they might be wrong. Their natural curiosity might do the rest.
That said, these steps aren’t always enough. No matter how
nicely we ask, other people don’t always want to dance. Sometimes
they’re so attached to their beliefs that the mere suggestion of getting
in sync feels like an ambush. What do we do then?
DR. JEKYLL AND MR. HOSTILE
Some years ago, a Wall Street firm brought me in to consult on a
project to attract and retain junior analysts and associates. After two
months of research I submitted a report with twenty-six data-driven
recommendations. In the middle of my presentation to the
leadership team, one of the members interrupted and asked, “Why
don’t we just pay them more?”
I told him money alone probably wouldn’t make a difference.
Many studies across a range of industries have shown that once
people are earning enough to meet their basic needs, paying them
more doesn’t stop them from leaving bad jobs and bad bosses. The
executive started arguing with me: “That’s not what I’ve found in my
experience.” I fired back in prosecutor mode: “Yes, that’s why I
brought you randomized, controlled experiments with longitudinal
data: to learn rigorously from many people’s experiences, not
idiosyncratically from yours.”
The executive pushed back, insisting that his company was
different, so I rattled off some basic statistics from his own
employees. In surveys and interviews, a grand total of zero had even
mentioned compensation. They were already well paid (read:
overpaid), and if that could have solved the problem, it already
would have.* But the executive still refused to budge. Finally I
became so exasperated that I did something out of character. I shot
back, “I’ve never seen a group of smart people act so dumb.”
In the hierarchy of disagreement created by computer scientist
Paul Graham, the highest form of argument is refuting the central
point, and the lowest is name-calling. In a matter of seconds I’d
devolved from logic bully to playground bully.
If I could do that session over, I’d start with common ground and
fewer data points. Instead of attacking their beliefs with my research,
I’d ask them what would open their minds to my data.
A few years later, I had a chance to test that approach. During a
keynote speech on creativity, I cited evidence that Beethoven and
Mozart didn’t have higher hit rates than some of their peers; they
generated a larger volume of work, which gave them more shots at
greatness. A member of the audience interrupted. “Bullsh*t!” he
shouted. “You’re disrespecting the great masters of music. You’re
totally ignorant—you don’t know what you’re talking about!”
Instead of reacting right then, I waited a few minutes until a
scheduled break and then made my way to my heckler.
Me: You’re welcome to disagree with the data, but I don’t
think that’s a respectful way to express your opinion. It’s not
how I was trained to have an intellectual debate. Were you?
Music man: Well, no . . . I just think you’re wrong.
Me: It’s not my opinion—it’s the independent finding of two
different social scientists. What evidence would change your
mind?
Music man: I don’t believe you can quantify a musician’s
greatness, but I’d like to see the research.
When I sent him the study, he responded with an apology. I
don’t know if I succeeded in changing his mind, but I had done a
better job of opening it.
When someone becomes hostile, if you respond by viewing the
argument as a war, you can either attack or retreat. If instead you
treat it as a dance, you have another option—you can sidestep.
Having a conversation about the conversation shifts attention away
from the substance of the disagreement and toward the process for
having a dialogue. The more anger and hostility the other person
expresses, the more curiosity and interest you show. When someone
is losing control, your tranquility is a sign of strength. It takes the
wind out of their emotional sails. It’s pretty rare for someone to
respond by screaming “SCREAMING IS MY PREFERRED MODE OF
COMMUNICATION!”
This is a fifth move that expert negotiators made more often than
average negotiators. They were more likely to comment on their
feelings about the process and test their understanding of the other
side’s feelings: I’m disappointed in the way this discussion has
unfolded—are you frustrated with it? I was hoping you’d see this
proposal as fair—do I understand correctly that you don’t see any
merit in this approach at all? Honestly, I’m a little confused by your
reaction to my data—if you don’t value the kind of work I do, why
did you hire me?
In a heated argument, you can always stop and ask, “What
evidence would change your mind?” If the answer is “nothing,” then
there’s no point in continuing the debate. You can lead a horse to
water, but you can’t make it think.
THE STRENGTH OF WEAK OPINIONS
When we hit a brick wall in a debate, we don’t have to stop talking
altogether. “Let’s agree to disagree” shouldn’t end a discussion. It
should start a new conversation, with a focus on understanding and
learning rather than arguing and persuading. That’s what we’d do in
scientist mode: take the long view and ask how we could have
handled the debate more effectively. Doing so might land us in a
better position to make the same case to a different person—or to
make a different case to the same person on a different day.
When I asked one of the Wall Street executives for advice on how
to approach debates differently in the future, he suggested
expressing less conviction. I could easily have countered that I was
uncertain about which of my twenty-six recommendations might be
relevant. I could also have conceded that although money didn’t
usually solve the problem, I’d never seen anyone test the effect of
million-dollar retention bonuses. That would be a fun experiment to
run, don’t you think?
A few years ago, I argued in my book Originals that if we want to
fight groupthink, it helps to have “strong opinions, weakly held.”
Since then I’ve changed my mind—I now believe that’s a mistake. If
we hold an opinion weakly, expressing it strongly can backfire.
Communicating it with some uncertainty signals confident humility,
invites curiosity, and leads to a more nuanced discussion. Research
shows that in courtrooms, expert witnesses and deliberating jurors
are more credible and more persuasive when they express moderate
confidence, rather than high or low confidence.* And these
principles aren’t limited to debates—they apply in a wide range of
situations where we’re advocating for our beliefs or even for
ourselves.
In 2014, a young woman named Michele Hansen came across a
job opening for a product manager at an investment company. She
was excited about the position but she wasn’t qualified for it: she had
no background in finance and lacked the required number of years of
experience. If you were in her shoes and you decided to go for it,
what would you say in your cover letter?
The natural starting point would be to emphasize your strengths
and downplay your weaknesses. As Michael Scott deadpanned on
The Office, “I work too hard, I care too much, and sometimes I can
be too invested in my job.” But Michele Hansen did the opposite,
taking a page out of the George Costanza playbook on Seinfeld: “My
name is George. I’m unemployed and I live with my parents.” Rather
than trying to hide her shortcomings, Michele opened with them.
“I’m probably not the candidate you’ve been envisioning,” her cover
letter began. “I don’t have a decade of experience as a Product
Manager nor am I a Certified Financial Planner.” After establishing
the drawbacks of her case, she emphasized a few reasons to hire her
anyway:
But what I do have are skills that can’t be taught. I take
ownership of projects far beyond my pay grade and what is
in my defined scope of responsibilities. I don’t wait for
people to tell me what to do and go seek for myself what
needs to be done. I invest myself deeply in my projects and it
shows in everything I do, from my projects at work to my
projects that I undertake on my own time at night. I’m
entrepreneurial, I get things done, and I know I would make
an excellent right hand for the co-founder leading this
project. I love breaking new ground and starting with a
blank slate. (And any of my previous bosses would be able to
attest to these traits.)
A week later a recruiter contacted her for a phone screen, and
then she had another phone screen with the team. On the calls, she
asked about experiments they’d run recently that had surprised
them. The question itself surprised the team—they ended up talking
about times when they were sure they were right but were later
proven wrong. Michele got the job, thrived, and was promoted to
lead product development. This success isn’t unique to her: there’s
evidence that people are more interested in hiring candidates who
acknowledge legitimate weaknesses as opposed to bragging or
humblebragging.
Even after recognizing that she was fighting an uphill battle,
Michele didn’t go on defense or offense. She didn’t preach her
qualifications or prosecute the problems with the job description. By
agreeing with the argument against her in her cover letter, she
preempted knee-jerk rejection, demonstrating that she was selfaware enough to discern her shortcomings and secure enough to
admit them.
An informed audience is going to spot the holes in our case
anyway. We might as well get credit for having the humility to look
for them, the foresight to spot them, and the integrity to
acknowledge them. By emphasizing a small number of core
strengths, Michele avoided argument dilution, focusing attention on
her strongest points. And by showing curiosity about times the team
had been wrong, she may have motivated them to rethink their
criteria. They realized that they weren’t looking for a set of skills and
credentials—they were looking to hire a human being with the
motivation and ability to learn. Michele knew what she didn’t know
and had the confidence to admit it, which sent a clear signal that she
could learn what she needed to know.
By asking questions rather than thinking for the audience, we
invite them to join us as a partner and think for themselves. If we
approach an argument as a war, there will be winners and losers. If
we see it more as a dance, we can begin to choreograph a way
forward. By considering the strongest version of an opponent’s
perspective and limiting our responses to our few best steps, we have
a better chance of finding a rhythm.
CHAPTER 6
Bad Blood on the Diamond
Diminishing Prejudice by Destabilizing Stereotypes
I hated the Yankees with all my heart, even to the point of
having to confess in my first holy confession that I wished
harm to others—namely that I wished various New York
Yankees would break arms, legs and ankles. . . .
—
O
ne afternoon in Maryland in 1983, Daryl Davis arrived at a
lounge to play the piano at a country music gig. It wasn’t his
first time being the only Black man in the room. Before the
night was out, it would be his first time having a conversation with a
white supremacist.
After the show, an older white man in the audience walked up to
Daryl and told him that he was astonished to see a Black musician
play like Jerry Lee Lewis. Daryl replied that he and Lewis were, in
fact, friends, and that Lewis himself had acknowledged that his style
was influenced by Black musicians. Although the man was skeptical,
he invited Daryl to sit down for a drink.
Soon the man was admitting that he’d never had a drink with a
Black person before. Eventually he explained to Daryl why. He was a
member of the Ku Klux Klan, the white supremacist hate group that
had been murdering African Americans for over a century and had
lynched a man just two years earlier.
If you found yourself sitting down with someone who hated you
and all people who shared your skin color, your instinctive options
might be fight, flight, or freeze—and rightfully so. Daryl had a
different reaction: he burst out laughing. When the man pulled out
his KKK membership card to show he wasn’t joking, Daryl returned
to a question that had been on his mind since he was ten years old.
In the late 1960s, he was marching in a Cub Scout parade when white
spectators started throwing cans, rocks, and bottles at him. It was the
first time he remembers facing overt racism, and although he could
justifiably have gotten angry, he was bewildered: “How can you hate
me when you don’t even know me?”
At the end of the conversation, the Klansman handed Daryl his
phone number and asked if he would call him whenever he was
playing locally. Daryl followed up, and the next month the man
showed up with a bunch of his friends to see Daryl perform.
Over time a friendship grew, and the man ended up leaving the
KKK. That was a turning point in Daryl’s life, too. It wasn’t long
before Daryl was sitting down with Imperial Wizards and Grand
Dragons—the Klan’s highest officers—to ask his question. Since then,
Daryl has convinced many white supremacists to leave the KKK and
abandon their hatred.
I wanted to understand how that kind of change happens—how
to break overconfidence cycles that are steeped in stereotypes and
prejudice about entire groups of people. Strangely enough, my
journey started at a baseball game.
HATE ME OUT AT THE BALLGAME
“Yankees suck! Yankees suck!” It was a summer night at Fenway
Park, my first and only time at a Boston Red Sox baseball game. In
the seventh inning, without warning, 37,000 people erupted into a
chant. The entire stadium was dissing the New York Yankees in
perfect harmony.
I knew the two teams had a century-long rivalry, widely viewed
as the most heated in all of American professional sports. I took it for
granted that the Boston fans would root against the Yankees. I just
didn’t expect it to happen that day, because the Yankees weren’t even
there.
The Red Sox were playing against the Oakland A’s. The Boston
fans were booing a team that was hundreds of miles away. It was as if
Burger King fans were going head-to-head against Wendy’s in a taste
test and started chanting “McDonald’s sucks!”
I started to wonder if Red Sox fans hate the Yankees more than
they love their own team. Boston parents have been known to teach
their kids to flip the bird at the Yankees and detest anything in
pinstripes, and
is apparently among the most popular
T-shirts in Boston history. When asked how much money it would
take to get them to taunt their own team, Red Sox fans requested an
average of $503. To root for the Yankees, they wanted even more:
$560. The feelings run so deep that neuroscientists can watch them
light up people’s minds: when Red Sox fans see the Yankees fail, they
show immediate activation in brain regions linked to reward and
pleasure. Those feelings extend well beyond Boston: in a 2019
analysis of tweets, the Yankees were the most hated baseball team in
twenty-eight of the fifty U.S. states, which may explain the popularity
of this T-shirt:
I recently called a friend who’s a die-hard Red Sox fan with a
simple question: what would it take to get him to root for the
Yankees? Without pausing, he said, “If they were playing Al
Qaeda . . . maybe.”
It’s one thing to love your team. It’s another to hate your rivals so
much that you’d consider rooting for terrorists to crush them. If you
despise a particular sports team—and its fans—you’re harboring
some strong opinions about a group of people. Those beliefs are
stereotypes, and they often spill over into prejudice. The stronger
your attitudes become, the less likely you are to rethink them.
Rivalries aren’t unique to sports. A rivalry exists whenever we
reserve special animosity for a group we see as competing with us for
resources or threatening our identities. In business, the rivalry
between footwear companies Puma and Adidas was so intense that
for generations, families self-segregated based on their allegiance to
the brands—they went to different bakeries, pubs, and shops, and
even refused to date people who worked for the rival firm. In politics,
you probably know some Democrats who view Republicans as being
greedy, ignorant, heartless cretins, and some Republicans who
regard Democrats as lazy, dishonest, hypersensitive snowflakes. As
stereotypes stick and prejudice deepens, we don’t just identify with
our own group; we disidentify with our adversaries, coming to define
who we are by what we’re not. We don’t just preach the virtues of our
side; we find self-worth in prosecuting the vices of our rivals.
When people hold prejudice toward a rival group, they’re often
willing to do whatever it takes to elevate their own group and
undermine their rivals—even if it means doing harm or doing wrong.
We see people cross those lines regularly in sports rivalries.*
Aggression extends well beyond the playing field: from Barcelona to
Brazil, fistfights frequently break out between soccer fans. Cheating
scandals are rampant, too, and they aren’t limited to athletes or
coaches. When students at The Ohio State University were paid to
participate in an experiment, they learned that if they were willing to
lie to a student from a different school, their own pay would double
and the other student’s compensation would be cut in half. Their
odds of lying quadrupled if the student attended the University of
Michigan—their biggest rival—rather than Berkeley or Virginia.
Why do people form stereotypes about rival groups in the first
place, and what does it take to get them to rethink them?
FITTING IN AND STANDING OUT
For decades psychologists have found that people can feel animosity
toward other groups even when the boundaries between them are
trivial. Take a seemingly innocuous question: is a hot dog a
sandwich? When students answered this question, most felt strongly
enough that they were willing to sacrifice a dollar to those who
agreed with them to make sure those who disagreed got less.
In every human society, people are motivated to seek belonging
and status. Identifying with a group checks both boxes at the same
time: we become part of a tribe, and we take pride when our tribe
wins. In classic studies on college campuses, psychologists found that
after their team won a football game, students were more likely to
walk around wearing school swag. From Arizona State to Notre
Dame to USC, students basked in the reflected glory of Saturday
victories, donning team shirts and hats and jackets on Sunday. If
their team lost, they shunned school apparel, and distanced
themselves by saying “they lost” instead of “we lost.” Some
economists and finance experts have even found that the stock
market rises if a country’s soccer team wins World Cup matches and
falls if they lose.*
Rivalries are most likely to develop between teams that are
geographically close, compete regularly, and are evenly matched. The
Yankees and Red Sox fit this pattern: they’re both on the East Coast,
they play each other eighteen or nineteen times a season, they both
have histories of success, and as of 2019, they had competed over
2,200 times—with each team winning over 1,000 times. The two
teams also have more fans than any other franchises in baseball.
I decided to test what it would take to get fans to rethink their
beliefs about their bitter rivals. Working with a doctoral student, Tim
Kundro, I ran a series of experiments with passionate Yankees and
Red Sox supporters. To get a sense of their stereotypes, we asked
over a thousand Red Sox and Yankees fans to list three negative
things about their rivals. They mostly used the same words to
describe one another, complaining about their respective accents,
their beards, and their tendency to “smell like old corn chips.”
WHY RED SOX FANS HATE YANKEES FANS
WHY YANKEES FANS HATE RED SOX FANS
Once we’ve formed those kinds of stereotypes, for both mental
and social reasons it’s hard to undo them. Psychologist George Kelly
observed that our beliefs are like pairs of reality goggles. We use
them to make sense of the world and navigate our surroundings. A
threat to our opinions cracks our goggles, leaving our vision blurred.
It’s only natural to put up our guard in response—and Kelly noticed
that we become especially hostile when trying to defend opinions
that we know, deep down, are false. Rather than trying on a different
pair of goggles, we become mental contortionists, twisting and
turning until we find an angle of vision that keeps our current views
intact.
Socially, there’s another reason stereotypes are so sticky. We
tend to interact with people who share them, which makes them even
more extreme. This phenomenon is called group polarization, and
it’s been demonstrated in hundreds of experiments. Juries with
authoritarian beliefs recommend harsher punishments after
deliberating together. Corporate boards are more likely to support
paying outlandish premiums for companies after group discussions.
Citizens who start out with a clear belief on affirmative action and
gay marriage develop more extreme views on these issues after
talking with a few others who share their stance. Their preaching and
prosecuting move in the direction of their politics. Polarization is
reinforced by conformity: peripheral members fit in and gain status
by following the lead of the most prototypical member of the group,
who often holds the most intense views.
Grow up in a family of Red Sox fans and you’re bound to hear
some unpleasant things about Yankees fans. Start making regular
trips to a ballpark packed with people who share your loathing, and
it’s only a matter of time before your contempt intensifies and
calcifies. Once that happens, you’re motivated to see the best in your
team and the worst in your opponent. Evidence shows that when
teams try to downplay a rivalry by reminding fans that it’s just a
game, it backfires. Fans feel their identity is being devalued and
actually become more aggressive. My first idea for disrupting this
pattern came from outer space.
HYPOTHESIS 1: NOT IN A LEAGUE OF THEIR
OWN
If you ever leave the planet Earth, you’ll probably end up rethinking
some of your feelings about other human beings. A team of
psychologists has studied the effects of outer space on inner space,
assessing the changes in more than a hundred astronauts and
cosmonauts through interviews, surveys, and analyses of
autobiographies. Upon returning from space, astronauts are less
focused on individual achievements and personal happiness, and
more concerned about the collective good. “You develop an instant
global consciousness . . . an intense dissatisfaction with the state of
the world, and a compulsion to do something about it,” Apollo 14
astronaut Edgar Mitchell reflected. “From out there on the moon,
international politics looks so petty. You want to grab a politician by
the scruff of the neck and drag him a quarter of a million miles out
and say, ‘Look at that, you son of a b*tch.’”
This reaction is known as the overview effect. The astronaut who
described it most vividly to me is space shuttle commander Jeff
Ashby. He recalled that the first time he looked back at the Earth
from outer space, it changed him forever:
On Earth, astronauts look to the stars—most of us are
star fanatics—but in space, the stars look the same as they do
on Earth. What is so different is the planet—the perspective
that it gives you. My first glimpse of the Earth from space
was about fifteen minutes into my first flight, when I looked
up from my checklist and suddenly we were over the lit part
of the Earth with our windows facing down. Below me was
the continent of Africa, and it was moving by much as a city
would move by from an airline seat. Circling the entire
planet in ninety minutes, you see that thin blue arc of the
atmosphere. Seeing how fragile the little layer is in which all
of humankind exists, you can easily from space see the
connection between someone on one side of the planet to
someone on the other—and there are no borders evident. So
it appears as just this one common layer that we all exist in.
When you get to see an overview of the Earth from outer space,
you realize you share a common identity with all human beings. I
wanted to create a version of the overview effect for baseball fans.
There’s some evidence that common identity can build bridges
between rivals. In one experiment, psychologists randomly assigned
Manchester United soccer fans a short writing task. They then staged
an emergency in which a passing runner slipped and fell, screaming
in pain as he held his ankle. He was wearing the T-shirt of their
biggest rival, and the question was whether they would stop to help
him. If the soccer fans had just written about why they loved their
team, only 30 percent helped. If they had written about what they
had in common with other soccer fans, 70 percent helped.
When Tim and I tried to get Red Sox and Yankees fans to reflect
on their common identity as baseball fans, it didn’t work. They didn’t
end up with more positive views of one another or a greater
willingness to help one another outside emergency situations. Shared
identity doesn’t stick in every circumstance. If a rival fan has just had
an accident, thinking about a common identity might motivate us to
help. If he’s not in danger or dire need, though, it’s too easy to
dismiss him as just another jerk—or not our responsibility. “We both
love baseball,” one Red Sox supporter commented. “The Yankees
fans just like the wrong team.” Another stated that their shared love
of baseball had no effect on his opinions: “The Yankees suck, and
their fans are annoying.”
HYPOTHESIS 2: FEELING FOR OUR FOES
I next turned to the psychology of peace. Years ago the pioneering
psychologist and Holocaust survivor Herb Kelman set out to
challenge some of the stereotypes behind the Israel-Palestine conflict
by teaching the two sides to understand and empathize with one
another. He designed interactive problem-solving workshops in
which influential Israeli and Palestinian leaders talked off the record
about paths to peace. For years, they came together to share their
own experiences and perspectives, address one another’s needs and
fears, and explore novel solutions to the conflict. Over time, the
workshops didn’t just shatter stereotypes—some of the participants
ended up forming lifelong friendships.
Humanizing the other side should be much easier in sports,
because the stakes are lower and the playing field is more level. I
started with another of the biggest rivalries in sports: UNC-Duke. I
asked Shane Battier, who led Duke to an NCAA basketball
championship in 2001, what it would take for him to root for UNC.
His immediate reply: “If they were playing the Taliban.” I had no
idea so many people fantasized about crushing terrorists in their
favorite sport. I wondered whether humanizing a Duke student
would change UNC students’ stereotypes of the group.
In an experiment with my colleagues Alison Fragale and Karren
Knowlton, we asked UNC students to help improve the job
application of a peer. If we mentioned that he went to Duke rather
than UNC, as long as he was facing significant financial need,
participants spent extra time helping him. Once they felt empathy for
his plight, they saw him as a unique individual deserving of
assistance and liked him more. Yet when we measured their views of
Duke students in general, the UNC students were just as likely to see
them as their rivals, to say that it felt like a personal compliment if
they heard someone criticize Duke, and to take it as a personal insult
if they heard Duke praised. We had succeeded in changing their
attitudes toward the student, but failed in changing their stereotypes
of the group.
Something similar happened when Tim and I tried to humanize
a Yankees fan. We had Red Sox fans read a story written by a
baseball buff who had learned the game as a child with his
grandfather and had fond memories of playing catch with his mom.
At the very end of the piece he mentioned that he was a die-hard
supporter of the Yankees. “I think this person is very authentic and is
a rare Yankee fan,” one Red Sox supporter commented. “This person
gets it and is not your typical Yankee fan,” a second observed. “Ugh, I
really liked this text until I got to the part about them being a
Yankees fan,” a third fan lamented, but “I think this particular
person I would have more in common with than the typical,
stereotypical Yankees fan. This person is okay.”
Herb Kelman ran into the same problem with Israelis and
Palestinians. In the problem-solving workshops, they came to trust
the individuals across the table, but they still held on to their
stereotypes of the group.
In an ideal world, learning about individual group members will
humanize the group, but often getting to know a person better just
establishes her as different from the rest of her group. When we meet
group members who defy a stereotype, our first instinct isn’t to see
them as exemplars and rethink the stereotype. It’s to see them as
exceptions and cling to our existing beliefs. So that attempt also
failed. Back to the drawing board again.
HYPOTHESIS 3: BEASTS OF HABIT
My all-time favorite commercial starts with a close-up of a man and a
woman kissing. As the camera zooms out, you see that he’s wearing
an Ohio State Buckeyes sweatshirt and she’s wearing a Michigan
Wolverines T-shirt. The caption: “Without sports, this wouldn’t be
disgusting.”
As a lifelong Wolverine fan, I was raised to boo at Buckeye fans.
My uncle filled his basement with Michigan paraphernalia, got up at
3:00 a.m. on Saturdays to start setting up for tailgates, and drove a
van with the Michigan logo emblazoned on the side. When I went
back home to Michigan for grad school and one of my college
roommates started medical school at Ohio State, it was only natural
for me to preach my school’s superiority by phone and prosecute his
intelligence by text.
A few years ago, I got to know an unusually kind woman in her
seventies who works with Holocaust survivors. Last summer, when
she mentioned that she had gone to Ohio State, my first response
was “yuck.” My next reaction was to be disgusted with myself. Who
cares where she went to school half a century ago? How did I get
programmed this way? Suddenly it seemed odd that anyone would
hate a team at all.
In ancient Greece, Plutarch wrote of a wooden ship that Theseus
sailed from Crete to Athens. To preserve the ship, as its old planks
decayed, Athenians would replace them with new wood. Eventually
all the planks had been replaced. It looked like the same ship, but
none of its parts was the same. Was it still the same ship? Later,
philosophers added a wrinkle: if you collected all the original planks
and fashioned them into a ship, would that be the same ship?
The ship of Theseus has a lot in common with a sports franchise.
If you hail from Boston, you might hate the 1920 Yankees for taking
Babe Ruth or the 1978 Yankees for dashing your World Series hopes.
Although the current team carries the same name, the pieces are
different. The players are long gone. So are the managers and
coaches. The stadium has been replaced. “You’re actually rooting for
the clothes,” Jerry Seinfeld quipped. “Fans will be so in love with a
player, but if he goes to a different team, they boo him. This is the
same human being in a different shirt; they hate him now. Boo!
Different shirt! Boo!”
I think it’s a ritual. A fun but arbitrary ritual—a ceremony that
we perform out of habit. We imprinted on it when we were young
and impressionable, or were new to a city and looking for esprit de
corps. Sure, there are moments where team loyalty does matter in
our lives: it allows us to high-five acquaintances at bars and hug
strangers at victory parades. It gives us a sense of solidarity. If you
reflect on it, though, hating an opposing team is an accident of birth.
If you had been born in New York instead of Boston, would you
really hate the Yankees?
For our third approach, Tim and I recruited fans of the Red Sox
and Yankees. To prove their allegiance, they had to correctly name
one of their team’s players from a photo—and the last year his team
had won the World Series. Then we took some steps to open their
minds. First, to help them recognize the complexity of their own
beliefs, we asked them to list three positives and three negatives
about fans of the opposing team. You saw the most common
negatives earlier, but they were able to come up with some positives,
too:
WHAT RED SOX FANS LIKE ABOUT YANKEES FANS
WHAT YANKEES FANS LIKE ABOUT RED SOX FANS
Then we randomly assigned half of them to go the extra step of
reflecting on the arbitrariness of their animosity:
Think and write about how Yankee fans and Red Sox fans
dislike each other for reasons that are fairly arbitrary. For
example, if you were born into a family of fans of the rival
team, you would likely also be a fan of them today.
To gauge their animosity toward their opponents, we gave them
a chance to decide how spicy the hot sauce sold in the rival team’s
stadium should be. The backstory was that consumer product
researchers were planning to do taste tests of hot sauces in baseball
stadiums. People who were randomly assigned to reflect on the
arbitrariness of their stereotypes selected less fiery hot sauce for
their rival’s stadium. We also gave them a chance to sabotage a rival
fan’s performance on a timed, paid math test by assigning harder
problems, and those who considered the arbitrariness of their
stereotypes picked easier questions for the rival fan.
People weren’t just more sympathetic toward a single fan—they
changed their views toward their rival team as a whole. They were
less likely to see their rival’s failure as their success, their rival’s
success as a personal insult, and criticism of their rival as a personal
compliment. And they were more likely to support their rival team in
ways that would normally be unthinkable: wearing the rival team’s
jerseys, sitting in its dugout at games, voting for its players in the AllStar Game, and even endorsing the team on social media. For some
fans, it was almost like breaking a religious code, but their comments
made it clear that they were rethinking their stances:
I think it is pretty dumb to hate someone just based on the
sports teams they enjoy supporting. Thinking about that
makes me want to reconsider how I feel about some
supporters of teams that I dislike.
If someone hated me because of the team that I loved, it
would feel unfair. Almost like a form of prejudice because
they are judging me based on one thing about me and hating
me for that reason. After feeling these thoughts, I may
change the way I interact with Red Sox fans.
The team they support is not necessarily indicative of who
they are. Even though they are wrong.
We’d finally made some progress. Our next step was to examine
the key ingredients behind the shift in fans’ views. We found that it
was thinking about the arbitrariness of their animosity—not the
positive qualities of their rival—that mattered. Regardless of whether
they generated reasons to like their rivals, fans showed less hostility
when they reflected on how silly the rivalry was. Knowing what it felt
like to be disliked for ridiculous reasons helped them see that this
conflict had real implications, that hatred for opposing fans isn’t all
fun and games.
ENTERING A PARALLEL UNIVERSE
Outside the lab, dismantling stereotypes and decreasing prejudice
rarely happen overnight. Even if people aren’t on guard from the
start, they’re quick to put their defenses up when their attitudes are
challenged. Getting through to them requires more than just telling
them that their views are arbitrary. A key step is getting them to do
some counterfactual thinking: helping them consider what they’d
believe if they were living in an alternative reality.
In psychology, counterfactual thinking involves imagining how
the circumstances of our lives could have unfolded differently. When
we realize how easily we could have held different stereotypes, we
might be more willing to update our views.* To activate
counterfactual thinking, you might ask people questions like: How
would your stereotypes be different if you’d been born Black,
Hispanic, Asian, or Native American? What opinions would you hold
if you’d been raised on a farm versus in a city, or in a culture on the
other side of the world? What beliefs would you cling to if you lived
in the 1700s?
You’ve already learned from debate champions and expert
negotiators that asking people questions can motivate them to
rethink their conclusions. What’s different about these kinds of
counterfactual questions is that they invite people to explore the
origins of their own beliefs—and reconsider their stances toward
other groups.
People gain humility when they reflect on how different
circumstances could have led them to different beliefs. They might
conclude that some of their past convictions had been too simplistic
and begin to question some of their negative views. That doubt could
leave them more curious about groups they’ve stereotyped, and they
might end up discovering some unexpected commonalities.
Recently, I stumbled onto an opportunity to encourage some
counterfactual thinking. A startup founder asked me to join an allhands meeting to share insights on how to better understand other
people’s personalities and our own. During our virtual fireside chat,
she mentioned that she was an astrology fan and the company was
full of them. I wondered if I could get some of them to see that they
held inaccurate stereotypes about people based on the month in
which they happened to be born. Here’s an excerpt of what
happened:
Me: You know we have no evidence whatsoever that
horoscopes influence personality, right?
Founder: That’s such a Capricorn thing to say.
Me: I think I’m a Leo. I’d love to find out what evidence
would change your mind.
Founder: So my partner has been trying for as long as
we’ve been dating. He’s given up. There’s nothing that can
convince me otherwise.
Me: Then you’re not thinking like a scientist. This is a
religion for you.
Founder: Yeah, well, maybe a little.
Me: What if you’d been born in China instead of the U.S.?
Some evidence just came out that if you’re a Virgo in China,
you get discriminated against in hiring and also in dating.
These poor Virgos are stereotyped as being difficult and
ornery.*
Founder: So in the West, Adam, that same discrimination
happens to Scorpios.
Although the founder started out resistant to my argument, after
considering how she might hold different stereotypes if she lived in
China, she recognized a familiar pattern. She’d seen an entire group
of people mistreated as a result of the positions of the sun and the
moon on the day they happened to enter the world.
Realizing how unfair discrimination based on zodiac signs was,
the founder ended up jumping in to help me build my case. As we
wrapped up the conversation, I offered to do a follow-up discussion
on the science of personality. More than a quarter of the company
signed up to participate. Afterward, one of the participants wrote
that “the biggest takeaway from this chat is the importance of
‘unlearning’ things to avoid being ignorant.” Having grasped how
arbitrary their stereotypes were, people were now more open to
rethinking their views.
Psychologists find that many of our beliefs are cultural truisms:
widely shared, but rarely questioned. If we take a closer look at them,
we often discover that they rest on shaky foundations. Stereotypes
don’t have the structural integrity of a carefully built ship. They’re
more like a tower in the game of Jenga—teetering on a small number
of blocks, with some key supports missing. To knock it over,
sometimes all we need to do is give it a poke. The hope is that people
will rise to the occasion and build new beliefs on a stronger
foundation.
Can this approach extend to bigger divisions among people? I
don’t believe for a minute that it will solve the Israel-Palestine
conflict or stop racism. I do think it’s a step, though, toward
something more fundamental than merely rethinking our
stereotypes. We might question the underlying belief that it makes
sense to hold opinions about groups at all.
If you get people to pause and reflect, they might decide that the
very notion of applying group stereotypes to individuals is absurd.
Research suggests that there are more similarities between groups
than we recognize. And there’s typically more variety within groups
than between them.
Sometimes letting go of stereotypes means realizing that many
members of a hated group aren’t so terrible after all. And that’s more
likely to happen when we actually come face-to-face with them. For
over half a century, social scientists have tested the effects of
intergroup contact. In a meta-analysis of over five hundred studies
with over 250,000 participants, interacting with members of another
group reduced prejudice in 94 percent of the cases. Although
intergroup communication isn’t a panacea, that is a staggering
statistic. The most effective way to help people pull the unsteady
Jenga blocks out of their stereotype towers is to talk with them in
person. Which is precisely what Daryl Davis did.
HOW A BLACK MUSICIAN CONFRONTS WHITE
SUPREMACISTS
One day, Daryl was driving his car with the chief officer of a KKK
chapter, whose official title was Exalted Cyclops. Before long, the
Cyclops was sharing his stereotypes of Black people. They were an
inferior species, he said—they had smaller brains, which made them
unintelligent, and a genetic predisposition toward violence. When
Daryl pointed out that he was Black but had never shot anyone or
stolen a car, the Cyclops told him his criminal gene must be latent. It
hadn’t come out yet.
Daryl decided to beat the Cyclops at his own game. He
challenged him to name three Black serial killers. When the Cyclops
couldn’t name any, Daryl rattled off a long list of well-known white
serial killers and told the Cyclops that he must be one. When the
Cyclops protested that he’d never killed anybody, Daryl turned his
own argument against him and said that his serial-killer gene must
be latent.
“Well, that’s stupid,” the flustered Cyclops replied. “Well, duh!”
Daryl agreed. “You’re right. What I said about you was stupid, but no
more stupid than what you said about me.” The Cyclops got very
quiet and changed the subject. Several months later, he told Daryl
that he was still thinking about that conversation. Daryl had planted
a seed of doubt and made him curious about his own beliefs. The
Cyclops ended up quitting the KKK and giving his hood and his robe
to Daryl.
Daryl is obviously extraordinary—not only in his ability to wage a
one-man war on prejudice, but also in his inclination to do so. As a
general rule, it’s those with greater power who need to do more of the
rethinking, both because they’re more likely to privilege their own
perspectives and because their perspectives are more likely to go
unquestioned. In most cases, the oppressed and marginalized have
already done a great deal of contortion to fit in.
Having been the target of racism since childhood, Daryl had a
lifetime of legitimate reasons to harbor animosity toward white
people. He was still willing to approach white supremacists with an
open mind and give them the opportunity to rethink their views. But
it shouldn’t have been Daryl’s responsibility to challenge white
supremacists and put himself at risk. In an ideal world, the Cyclops
would have taken it upon himself to educate his peers. Some other
former KKK members have stepped up, working independently and
with Daryl to advocate for the oppressed and reform the structures
that produce oppression in the first place.
As we work toward systemic change, Daryl urges us not to
overlook the power of conversation. When we choose not to engage
with people because of their stereotypes or prejudice, we give up on
opening their minds. “We are living in space-age times, yet there are
still so many of us thinking with stone-age minds,” he reflects. “Our
ideology needs to catch up to our technology.” He estimates that he
has helped upwards of two hundred white supremacists rethink their
beliefs and leave the KKK and other neo-Nazi groups. Many of them
have gone on to educate their families and friends. Daryl is quick to
point out that he hasn’t directly persuaded these men to change their
minds. “I didn’t convert anybody,” he says. “I gave them reason to
think about their direction in life, and they thought about it, and
thought, ‘I need a better path, and this is the way to go.’”
Daryl doesn’t do this by preaching or prosecuting. When he
begins a dialogue with white supremacists, many are initially
surprised by his thoughtfulness. As they start to see him as an
individual and spend more time with him, they often tap into a
common identity around shared interests in topics like music. Over
time, he helps them see that they joined these hate groups for
reasons that weren’t their own—it was a family tradition dating back
multiple generations, or someone had told them their jobs were
being taken by Black men. As they realize how little they truly know
about other groups, and how shallow stereotypes are, they start to
think again.
After getting to know Daryl, one Imperial Wizard didn’t stop at
leaving the KKK. He shut down the chapter. Years later, he asked
Daryl to be his daughter’s godfather.
CHAPTER 7
Vaccine Whisperers and MildMannered Interrogators
How the Right Kind of Listening Motivates People to
Change
It’s a rare person who wants to hear what he doesn’t want to
hear.
—
W
hen Marie-Hélène Étienne-Rousseau went into labor, she
broke down in tears. It was September 2018, and her baby
wasn’t due until December. Just before midnight, Tobie
arrived, weighing just two pounds. His body was so tiny that his head
could fit in the palm of her hand, and Marie-Hélène was terrified
that he wouldn’t survive. Tobie spent only a few seconds in her arms
before he was rushed to the neonatal intensive care unit. He needed
a mask to breathe and was soon taken to surgery for internal
bleeding. It would be months before he was allowed to go home.
While Tobie was still in the hospital, Marie-Hélène was shopping
for diapers when she saw a headline about measles spreading in her
province of Quebec. She hadn’t had Tobie vaccinated. It wasn’t even
a question—he seemed too fragile. She hadn’t vaccinated her three
other children, either; it wasn’t the norm in her community. Her
friends and neighbors took it for granted that vaccines were
dangerous and passed around horror stories about their side effects.
Still, the fact remained: Quebec had already had two serious measles
outbreaks that decade.
Today in the developed world, measles is on the rise for the first
time in at least half a century, and its mortality rate is around one in
a thousand. In the developing world, it’s closer to one in a hundred.
Estimates suggest that from 2016 to 2018, measles deaths spiked
worldwide by 58 percent, with over a hundred thousand casualties.
These deaths could have been prevented by the vaccine, which has
saved roughly 20 million lives in the past two decades. Although
epidemiologists recommend two doses of the measles vaccine and a
minimum immunization rate of 95 percent, around the globe only 85
percent of people get the first dose and just 67 percent continue to
the second. Many of those who skip the shot simply do not believe in
the science.
Government officials have tried to prosecute the problem, some
warning that the unvaccinated could be fined up to a thousand
dollars and sentenced to jail for up to six months. Many schools shut
their doors to unvaccinated children, and one county even banned
them from enclosed public places. When such measures failed to
solve the problem, public officials turned to preaching. Since people
held unfounded fears about vaccines, it was time to educate them
with a dose of the truth.
The results were often disappointing. In a pair of experiments in
Germany, introducing people to the research on vaccine safety
backfired: they ended up seeing vaccines as riskier. Similarly, when
Americans read accounts of the dangers of measles, saw pictures of
children suffering from it, or learned of an infant who nearly died
from it, their interest in vaccination didn’t rise at all. And when they
were informed that there was no evidence that the measles vaccine
causes autism, those who already had concerns actually became less
interested in vaccinating. It seemed that no logical argument or datadriven explanation could shake their conviction that vaccines were
unsafe.
This is a common problem in persuasion: what doesn’t sway us
can make our beliefs stronger. Much like a vaccine inoculates our
physical immune system against a virus, the act of resistance fortifies
our psychological immune system. Refuting a point of view produces
antibodies against future influence attempts. We become more
certain of our opinions and less curious about alternative views.
Counterarguments no longer surprise us or stump us—we have our
rebuttals ready.
Marie-Hélène Étienne-Rousseau had been through that journey.
Visits to the doctor with her older kids followed a familiar script. The
doctor extolled the benefits of vaccines, warned her about the risks of
refusing them, and stuck to generic messaging instead of engaging
with her particular questions. The whole experience reeked of
condescension. Marie-Hélène felt as if she were being attacked, “as if
she were accusing me of wanting my kids to get sick. As if I were a
bad mother.”
When tiny Tobie was finally cleared to leave after five months in
the hospital, he was still extremely vulnerable. The nurses knew it
was their last chance to have him vaccinated, so they called in a
vaccine whisperer—a local doctor with a radical approach for helping
young parents rethink their resistance to immunizations. He didn’t
preach to parents or prosecute them. He didn’t get political. He put
on his scientist hat and interviewed them.
Calvin & Hobbes © 1993 Watterson. Reprinted with permission of
. All rights reserved.
MOTIVATING THROUGH INTERVIEWING
In the early 1980s, a clinical psychologist named Bill Miller was
troubled by his field’s attitude toward people with addictions. It was
common for therapists and counselors to accuse their substanceabusing clients of being pathological liars who were living in denial.
That didn’t track with what Miller was seeing up close in his own
work treating people with alcohol problems, where preaching and
prosecuting typically boomeranged. “People who drink too much are
usually aware of it,” Miller told me. “If you try to persuade them that
they do drink too much or need to make a change, you evoke
resistance, and they are less likely to change.”
Instead of attacking or demeaning his clients, Miller started
asking them questions and listening to their answers. Soon
afterward, he published a paper on his philosophy, which found its
way into the hands of Stephen Rollnick, a young nurse trainee
working in addiction treatment. A few years later, the two happened
to meet in Australia and realized that what they were exploring was
much bigger than just a new approach to treatment. It was an
entirely different way of helping people change.
Together, they developed the core principles of a practice called
motivational interviewing. The central premise is that we can rarely
motivate someone else to change. We’re better off helping them find
their own motivation to change.
Let’s say you’re a student at Hogwarts, and you’re worried your
uncle is a fan of Voldemort. A motivational interview might go like
this:
You: I’d love to better understand your feelings about He
Who Must Not Be Named.
Uncle: Well, he’s the most powerful wizard alive. Also, his
followers promised me a fancy title.
You: Interesting. Is there anything you dislike about him?
Uncle: Hmm. I’m not crazy about all the murdering.
You: Well, nobody’s perfect.
Uncle: Yeah, but the killing is really bad.
You: Sounds like you have some reservations about
Voldemort. What’s stopped you from abandoning him?
Uncle: I’m afraid he might direct the murdering toward me.
You: That’s a reasonable fear. I’ve felt it too. I’m curious:
are there any principles that matter so deeply to you that
you’d be willing to take that risk?
Motivational interviewing starts with an attitude of humility and
curiosity. We don’t know what might motivate someone else to
change, but we’re genuinely eager to find out. The goal isn’t to tell
people what to do; it’s to help them break out of overconfidence
cycles and see new possibilities. Our role is to hold up a mirror so
they can see themselves more clearly, and then empower them to
examine their beliefs and behaviors. That can activate a rethinking
cycle, in which people approach their own views more scientifically.
They develop more humility about their knowledge, doubt in their
convictions, and curiosity about alternative points of view.
The process of motivational interviewing involves three key
techniques:
Asking open-ended questions
Engaging in reflective listening
Affirming the person’s desire and ability to change
As Marie-Hélène was getting ready to take Tobie home, the
vaccine whisperer the nurses called was a neonatologist and
researcher named Arnaud Gagneur. His specialty was applying the
techniques of motivational interviewing to vaccination discussions.
When Arnaud sat down with Marie-Hélène, he didn’t judge her for
not vaccinating her children, nor did he order her to change. He was
like a scientist or “a less abrasive Socrates,” as journalist Eric
Boodman described him in reporting on their meeting.
Arnaud told Marie-Hélène he was afraid of what might happen if
Tobie got the measles, but he accepted her decision and wanted to
understand it better. For over an hour, he asked her open-ended
questions about how she had reached the decision not to vaccinate.
He listened carefully to her answers, acknowledging that the world is
full of confusing information about vaccine safety. At the end of the
discussion, Arnaud reminded Marie-Hélène that she was free to
choose whether or not to immunize, and he trusted her ability and
intentions.
Before Marie-Hélène left the hospital, she had Tobie vaccinated.
A key turning point, she recalls, was when Arnaud “told me that
whether I chose to vaccinate or not, he respected my decision as
someone who wanted the best for my kids. Just that sentence—to
me, it was worth all the gold in the world.”
Marie-Hélène didn’t just allow Tobie to be vaccinated—she had
his older siblings vaccinated at home by a public health nurse. She
even asked if Arnaud would speak with her sister-in-law about
vaccinating her children. She said her decision was unusual enough
in her antivaccination community that “it was like setting off a
bomb.”
Marie-Hélène Étienne-Rousseau is one of many parents who
have undergone a conversion like this. Vaccine whisperers don’t just
help people change their beliefs; they help them change their
behaviors, too. In Arnaud’s first study, with mothers in the maternity
ward after birth, 72 percent said they planned to vaccinate their
children; after a motivational interviewing session with a vaccine
counselor, 87 percent were onboard. In Arnaud’s next experiment, if
mothers attended a motivational interviewing session, children were
9 percent more likely to be fully vaccinated two years later. If this
sounds like a small effect, remember that it was the result of only a
single conversation in the maternity ward—and it was sufficient to
change behavior as far out as twenty-four months later. Soon the
government health ministry was investing millions of dollars in
Arnaud’s motivational interviewing program, with a plan to send
vaccine whisperers into the maternity wards of every hospital in
Quebec.
Today, motivational interviewing is used around the world by
tens of thousands of practitioners—there are registered trainers
throughout America and in many parts of Europe, and courses to
build the necessary skills are offered as widely as Argentina,
Malaysia, and South Africa. Motivational interviewing has been the
subject of more than a thousand controlled trials; a bibliography that
simply lists them runs sixty-seven pages. It’s been used effectively by
health professionals to help people stop smoking, abusing drugs and
alcohol, gambling, and having unsafe sex, as well as to improve their
diets and exercise habits, overcome eating disorders, and lose
weight. It’s also been applied successfully by coaches to build grit in
professional soccer players, teachers to nudge students to get a full
night’s sleep, consultants to prepare teams for organizational change,
public health workers to encourage people to disinfect water in
Zambia, and environmental activists to help people do something
about climate change. Similar techniques have opened the minds of
prejudiced voters, and when conflict mediators help separated
parents resolve disputes about their children, motivational
interviewing is twice as likely to result in a full agreement as
standard mediation.
Overall, motivational interviewing has a statistically and
clinically meaningful effect on behavior change in roughly three out
of four studies, and psychologists and physicians using it have a
success rate of four in five. There aren’t many practical theories in
the behavioral sciences with a body of evidence this robust.
Motivational interviewing isn’t limited to professional settings—
it’s relevant to everyday decisions and interactions. One day a friend
called me for advice on whether she should get back together with
her ex. I was a fan of the idea, but I didn’t think it was my place to
tell her what to do. Instead of offering my opinion, I asked her to
walk through the pros and cons and tell me how they stacked up
against what she wanted in a partner. She ended up talking herself
into rekindling the relationship. The conversation felt like magic,
because I hadn’t tried to persuade her or even given any advice.*
When people ignore advice, it isn’t always because they disagree
with it. Sometimes they’re resisting the sense of pressure and the
feeling that someone else is controlling their decision. To protect
their freedom, instead of giving commands or offering
recommendations, a motivational interviewer might say something
along the lines of “Here are a few things that have helped me—do you
think any of them might work for you?”
You’ve seen how asking questions can help with self-persuasion.
Motivational interviewing goes a step further, guiding others to selfdiscovery. You got a glimpse of it in action when Daryl Davis asked
KKK members how they could hate him when they didn’t even know
him, and now I want to unpack the relevant techniques in depth.
When we try to convince people to think again, our first instinct is
usually to start talking. Yet the most effective way to help others
open their minds is often to listen.
BEYOND THE CLINIC
Years ago I got a call asking for help from a biotechnology startup.
The CEO, Jeff, was a scientist by training; he liked to have all the
necessary data before making a decision. After more than a year and
a half at the helm, he still hadn’t rolled out a vision for the company,
and it was in danger of failing. A trio of consultants tried to convince
him to offer some direction, and he fired them all. Before the head of
HR threw in the towel, she threw a Hail Mary pass and contacted an
academic. It was the perfect time for a motivational interview: Jeff
seemed reluctant to change, and I had no idea why. When we met, I
decided to see if I could help him find his motivation to change. Here
are the pivotal moments from our conversation:
Me: I really enjoy being the guy who gets hired after three
consultants get fired. I’d love to hear how they screwed up.
Jeff: The first consultant gave me answers instead of asking
questions. That was arrogant: how could he solve a problem
before he’d even taken the time to understand it? The next
two did a better job learning from me, but they still ended up
trying to tell me how to do my job.
Me: So why did you bother to bring in another outsider?
Jeff: I’m looking for some fresh ideas on leadership.
Me: It’s not my place to tell you how to lead. What does
leadership mean to you?
Jeff: Making systemic decisions, having a well-thought-out
strategy.
Me: Are there any leaders you admire for those qualities?
Jeff: Abraham Lincoln, Martin Luther King Jr., Steve Jobs.
That was a turning point. In motivational interviewing, there’s a
distinction between sustain talk and change talk. Sustain talk is
commentary about maintaining the status quo. Change talk is
referencing a desire, ability, need, or commitment to make
adjustments. When contemplating a change, many people are
ambivalent—they have some reasons to consider it but also some
reasons to stay the course. Miller and Rollnick suggest asking about
and listening for change talk, and then posing some questions about
why and how they might change.
Say you have a friend who mentions a desire to stop smoking.
You might respond by asking why she’s considering quitting. If she
says a doctor recommended it, you might follow up by inquiring
about her own motivations: what does she think of the idea? If she
offers a reason why she’s determined to stop, you might ask what her
first step toward quitting could be. “Change talk is a golden thread,”
clinical psychologist Theresa Moyers says. “What you need to do is
you need to pick that thread up and pull it.” So that’s what I did with
Jeff.
Me: What do you appreciate most about the leaders you
named?
Jeff: They all had vivid visions. They inspired people to
achieve extraordinary things.
Me: Interesting. If Steve Jobs were in your shoes right now,
what do you think he’d do?
Jeff: He’d probably get his leadership team fired up about a
bold idea and create a reality distortion field to make it seem
possible. Maybe I should do that, too.
A few weeks later, Jeff stood up at an executive off-site to deliver
his first-ever vision speech. When I heard about it, I was beaming
with pride: I had conquered my inner logic bully and led him to find
his own motivation.
Unfortunately, the board ended up shutting down the company
anyway.
Jeff’s speech had fallen flat. He stumbled through notes on a
napkin and didn’t stir up enthusiasm about the company’s direction.
I had overlooked a key step—helping him think about how to execute
the change effectively.
There’s a fourth technique of motivational interviewing, which is
often recommended for the end of a conversation and for transition
points: summarizing. The idea is to explain your understanding of
other people’s reasons for change, to check on whether you’ve missed
or misrepresented anything, and to inquire about their plans and
possible next steps.
The objective is not to be a leader or a follower, but a guide.
Miller and Rollnick liken it to hiring a tour guide in a foreign
country: we don’t want her to order us around, but we don’t want her
to follow us around, either. I was so excited that Jeff had decided to
share his vision that I didn’t ask any questions about what it was—or
how he would present it. I had worked with him to rethink whether
and when to give a speech, but not what was in it.
If I could go back, I’d ask Jeff how he was considering conveying
his message and how he thought his team would receive it. A good
guide doesn’t stop at helping people change their beliefs or
behaviors. Our work isn’t done until we’ve helped them accomplish
their goals.
Part of the beauty of motivational interviewing is that it
generates more openness in both directions. Listening can encourage
others to reconsider their stance toward us, but it also gives us
information that can lead us to question our own views about them.
If we take the practices of motivational interviewing seriously, we
might become the ones who think again.
It’s not hard to grasp how motivational interviewing can be
effective for consultants, doctors, therapists, teachers, and coaches.
When people have sought out our assistance—or accepted that it’s
our job to help—we’re in a position to earn their trust. Yet we all face
situations in which we’re tempted to steer people in the direction we
prefer. Parents and mentors often believe they know what’s best for
their children and protégés. Salespeople, fundraisers, and
entrepreneurs have a vested interest in getting to yes.
Motivational interviewing pioneers Miller and Rollnick have long
warned that the technique shouldn’t be used manipulatively.
Psychologists have found that when people detect an attempt at
influence, they have sophisticated defense mechanisms. The moment
people feel that we’re trying to persuade them, our behavior takes on
a different meaning. A straightforward question is seen as a political
tactic, a reflective listening statement comes across as a prosecutor’s
maneuvering, an affirmation of their ability to change sounds like a
preacher’s proselytizing.
Motivational interviewing requires a genuine desire to help
people reach their goals. Jeff and I both wanted his company to
succeed. Marie-Hélène and Arnaud both wanted Tobie to be healthy.
If your goals don’t seem to be aligned, how do you help people
change their own minds?
THE ART OF INFLUENTIAL LISTENING
Betty Bigombe had already hiked eight miles through the jungle, and
there was still no sign of life. She was no stranger to a long walk:
growing up in northern Uganda, she walked four miles each way to
school. She subsisted on one meal a day in a communal homestead
where her uncle had eight wives. Now she had made it all the way to
the Ugandan Parliament, and she was undertaking a challenge that
none of her colleagues would brave: trying to make peace with a
warlord.
Joseph Kony was the leader of the Lord’s Resistance Army. He
and his rebel group would eventually be held responsible for
murdering over a hundred thousand people, abducting over thirty
thousand children, and displacing over two million Ugandans. In the
early 1990s, Betty convinced the Ugandan president to send her in to
see if she could stop the violence.
When Betty finally made contact with the rebels after months of
effort, they were insulted at the prospect of negotiating with a
woman. Yet Betty negotiated her way into getting permission to meet
Kony himself. Soon he was referring to her as Mummy, and he even
agreed to leave the jungle to start peace talks. Although the peace
effort didn’t succeed, opening Kony’s mind to conversation was a
remarkable accomplishment in itself.* For her efforts to end the
violence, Betty was named Uganda’s Woman of the Year. When I
spoke to her recently, I asked how she had succeeded in getting
through to Kony and his people. The key, she explained, was not
persuading or even coaxing, but listening.
Listening well is more than a matter of talking less. It’s a set of
skills in asking and responding. It starts with showing more interest
in other people’s interests rather than trying to judge their status or
prove our own. We can all get better at asking “truly curious
questions that don’t have the hidden agenda of fixing, saving,
advising, convincing or correcting,” journalist Kate Murphy writes,
and helping to “facilitate the clear expression of another person’s
thoughts.”*
When we’re trying to get people to change, that can be a difficult
task. Even if we have the best intentions, we can easily slip into the
mode of a preacher perched on a pulpit, a prosecutor making a
closing argument, or a politician giving a stump speech. We’re all
vulnerable to the “righting reflex,” as Miller and Rollnick describe it
—the desire to fix problems and offer answers. A skilled motivational
interviewer resists the righting reflex—although people want a doctor
to fix their broken bones, when it comes to the problems in their
heads, they often want sympathy rather than solutions.
That’s what Betty Bigombe set out to provide in Uganda. She
started traveling through rural areas to visit camps for internally
displaced people. She figured some might have relatives in Joseph
Kony’s army and might know something of his whereabouts.
Although she hadn’t been trained in motivational interviewing, she
intuitively understood the philosophy. At each camp, she announced
to people that she wasn’t there to lecture them, but to listen to them.
Her curiosity and confident humility caught the Ugandans by
surprise. Other peacemakers had come in ordering them to stop
fighting. They had preached about their own plans for conflict
resolution and prosecuted the past efforts that failed. Now Betty, a
politician by profession, wasn’t telling them what to do. She just sat
patiently for hours in front of a bonfire, taking notes and chiming in
from time to time to ask questions. “If you want to call me names,
feel free to do so,” she said. “If you want me to leave, I will.”
To demonstrate her commitment to peace, Betty stayed in the
camps even though they lacked sufficient food and proper sanitation.
She invited people to air their grievances and suggest remedial
measures to be taken. They told her that it was rare and refreshing
for an outsider to give them the opportunity to share their views. She
empowered them to generate their own solutions, which gave them a
sense of ownership. They ended up calling her Megu, which
translates literally to “mother” and is also a term of endearment for
elders. Bestowing this honorific was particularly striking since Betty
was representing the government—which was seen as the oppressor
in many of the camps. It wasn’t long before people were offering to
introduce her to coordinators and commanders in Joseph Kony’s
guerrilla army. As Betty muses, “Even the devil appreciates being
listened to.”
In a series of experiments, interacting with an empathetic,
nonjudgmental, attentive listener made people less anxious and
defensive. They felt less pressure to avoid contradictions in their
thinking, which encouraged them to explore their opinions more
deeply, recognize more nuances in them, and share them more
openly. These benefits of listening aren’t limited to one-on-one
interactions—they can also emerge in groups. In experiments across
government organizations, tech companies, and schools, people’s
attitudes became more complex and less extreme after they sat in a
listening circle, where one person at a time held a talking stick and
everyone else listened attentively. Psychologists recommend
practicing this skill by sitting down with people whom we sometimes
have a hard time understanding. The idea is to tell them that we’re
working on being better listeners, we’d like to hear their thoughts,
and we’ll listen for a few minutes before responding.
Many communicators try to make themselves look smart. Great
listeners are more interested in making their audiences feel smart.
They help people approach their own views with more humility,
doubt, and curiosity. When people have a chance to express
themselves out loud, they often discover new thoughts. As the writer
E. M. Forster put it, “How can I tell what I think till I see what I say?”
That understanding made Forster an unusually dedicated listener. In
the words of one biographer, “To speak with him was to be seduced
by an inverse charisma, a sense of being listened to with such
intensity that you had to be your most honest, sharpest, and best
self.”
Inverse charisma. What a wonderful turn of phrase to capture
the magnetic quality of a great listener. Think about how rare that
kind of listening is. Among managers rated as the worst listeners by
their employees, 94 percent of them evaluated themselves as good or
very good listeners. Dunning and Kruger might have something to
say about that. In one poll, a third of women said their pets were
better listeners than their partners. Maybe it wasn’t just my kids
who wanted a cat. It’s common for doctors to interrupt their
patients within 11 seconds, even though patients may need only 29
seconds to describe their symptoms. In Quebec, however, MarieHélène experienced something very different.
When Marie-Hélène explained that she was concerned about
autism and the effects of administering multiple vaccines
simultaneously, Arnaud didn’t bombard her with a barrage of
scientific facts. He asked what her sources were. Like many parents,
she said she had read about vaccines on the internet but didn’t
remember where. He agreed that in a sea of conflicting claims, it’s
difficult to gain a clear sense of whether immunization is safe.
Eventually, when he understood Marie-Hélène’s beliefs, Arnaud
asked if he could share some information about vaccines based on
his own expertise. “I started a dialogue,” he told me. “The aim was to
build a trusting relationship. If you present information without
permission, no one will listen to you.” Arnaud was able to address
her fears and misconceptions by explaining that the measles vaccine
is a weakened live virus, so the symptoms are typically minimal, and
there’s no evidence that it increases autism or other syndromes. He
wasn’t delivering a lecture; he was engaging in a discussion. MarieHélène’s questions guided the evidence he shared, and they
reconstructed her knowledge together. Every step of the way, Arnaud
avoided putting pressure on her. Even after talking through the
science, he concluded the conversation by telling her he would let her
think about it, affirming her freedom to make up her own mind.
In 2020, during the worst snowstorm of the winter, a married
couple drove an hour and a half to visit Arnaud. They hadn’t
vaccinated any of their children, but after forty-five minutes of
discussion with him, they decided to vaccinate all four of them. The
couple lived in Marie-Hélène’s village, and seeing other children
vaccinated there made the mother curious enough to seek more
information.
The power of listening doesn’t lie just in giving people the space
to reflect on their views. It’s a display of respect and an expression of
care. When Arnaud took the time to understand Marie-Hélène’s
concerns instead of dismissing them, he was showing a sincere
interest in her well-being and that of her son. When Betty Bigombe
stayed with displaced Ugandans in their camps and asked them to air
their grievances, she was proving that what they had to say mattered
to her. Listening is a way of offering others our scarcest, most
precious gift: our attention. Once we’ve demonstrated that we care
about them and their goals, they’re more willing to listen to us.
If we can convince a mother to vaccinate her vulnerable children
—or a warlord to consider peace talks—it’s easy to conclude that the
ends justify whatever means are necessary. But it’s worth
remembering that the means are a measure of our character. When
we succeed in changing someone’s mind, we shouldn’t only ask
whether we’re proud of what we’ve achieved. We should also ask
whether we’re proud of how we’ve achieved it.
PART III
Collective Rethinking
Creating Communities of Lifelong Learners
CHAPTER 8
Charged Conversations
Depolarizing Our Divided Discussions
When conflict is cliché, complexity is breaking news.
—
E
ager to have a jaw-clenching, emotionally fraught argument
about abortion? How about immigration, the death penalty, or
climate change? If you think you can handle it, head for the
second floor of a brick building on the Columbia University campus
in New York. It’s the home of the Difficult Conversations Lab.
If you’re brave enough to visit, you’ll be matched up with a
stranger who strongly disagrees with your views on a controversial
topic. You’ll be given just twenty minutes to discuss the issue, and
then you’ll both have to decide whether you’ve aligned enough to
write and sign a joint statement on your shared views around
abortion laws. If you’re able to do so—no small feat—your statement
will be posted on a public forum.
For two decades, the psychologist who runs the lab, Peter T.
Coleman, has been bringing people together to talk about polarizing
issues. His mission is to reverse-engineer the successful
conversations and then experiment with recipes to make more of
them.
To put you in the right mindset before you begin your
conversation about abortion, Peter gives you and the stranger a news
article about another divisive issue: gun control. What you don’t
know is that there are different versions of the gun control article,
and which one you read is going to have a major impact on whether
you land on the same page about abortion.
If the gun control article covers both sides of the issue, making a
balanced case for both gun rights and gun legislation, you and your
adversary have a decent chance at reaching consensus on abortion.
In one of Peter’s experiments, after reading a “both-sides” article, 46
percent of pairs were able to find enough common ground to draft
and sign a statement together. That’s a remarkable result.
But Peter went on to do something far more impressive. He
randomly assigned some pairs to read another version of the same
article, which led 100 percent of them to generate and sign a joint
statement about abortion laws.
That version of the article featured the same information but
presented it differently. Instead of describing the issue as a blackand-white disagreement between two sides, the article framed the
debate as a complex problem with many shades of gray, representing
a number of different viewpoints.
At the turn of the last century, the great hope for the internet was
that it would expose us to different views. But as the web welcomed a
few billion fresh voices and vantage points into the conversation, it
also became a weapon of misinformation and disinformation. By the
2016 elections, as the problem of political polarization became more
extreme and more visible, the solution seemed obvious to me. We
needed to burst filter bubbles in our news feeds and shatter echo
chambers in our networks. If we could just show people the other
side of an issue, they would open their minds and become more
informed. Peter’s research challenges that assumption.
We now know that where complicated issues are concerned,
seeing the opinions of the other side is not enough. Social media
platforms have exposed us to them, but they haven’t changed our
minds. Knowing another side exists isn’t sufficient to leave preachers
doubting whether they’re on the right side of morality, prosecutors
questioning whether they’re on the right side of the case, or
politicians wondering whether they’re on the right side of history.
Hearing an opposing opinion doesn’t necessarily motivate you to
rethink your own stance; it makes it easier for you to stick to your
guns (or your gun bans). Presenting two extremes isn’t the solution;
it’s part of the polarization problem.
Psychologists have a name for this: binary bias. It’s a basic
human tendency to seek clarity and closure by simplifying a complex
continuum into two categories. To paraphrase the humorist Robert
Benchley, there are two kinds of people: those who divide the world
into two kinds of people, and those who don’t.
An antidote to this proclivity is complexifying: showcasing the
range of perspectives on a given topic. We might believe we’re
making progress by discussing hot-button issues as two sides of a
coin, but people are actually more inclined to think again if we
present these topics through the many lenses of a prism. To borrow a
phrase from Walt Whitman, it takes a multitude of views to help
people realize that they too contain multitudes.
A dose of complexity can disrupt overconfidence cycles and spur
rethinking cycles. It gives us more humility about our knowledge and
more doubts about our opinions, and it can make us curious enough
to discover information we were lacking. In Peter’s experiment, all it
took was framing gun control not as an issue with only two extreme
positions but rather as one involving many interrelated dilemmas. As
journalist Amanda Ripley describes it, the gun control article “read
less like a lawyer’s opening statement and more like an
anthropologist’s field notes.” Those field notes were enough to help
pro-life and pro-choice advocates find some areas of agreement on
abortion in only twenty minutes.
The article didn’t just leave people open to rethinking their views
on abortion; they also reconsidered their positions on other divisive
issues like affirmative action and the death penalty.* If people read
the binary version of the article, they defended their own perspective
more often than they showed an interest in their opponent’s. If they
read the complexified version, they made about twice as many
comments about common ground as about their own views. They
asserted fewer opinions and asked more questions. At the end of the
conversation, they generated more sophisticated, higher-quality
position statements—and both parties came away more satisfied.
For a long time, I struggled with how to handle politics in this
book. I don’t have any silver bullets or simple bridges across a
widening gulf. I don’t really even believe in political parties. As an
organizational psychologist, I want to vet candidates’ leadership
skills before I worry about their policy positions. As a citizen, I
believe it’s my responsibility to form an independent opinion on
each issue. Eventually, I decided that the best way to stay above the
fray was to explore the moments that affect us all as individuals: the
charged conversations we have in person and online.
Resisting the impulse to simplify is a step toward becoming more
argument literate. Doing so has profound implications for how we
communicate about polarizing issues. In the traditional media, it can
help journalists open people’s minds to uncomfortable facts. On
social media, it can help all of us have more productive Twitter tiffs
and Facebook fights. At family gatherings, it might not land you on
the same page as your least favorite uncle, but it could very well
prevent a seemingly innocent conversation from exploding into an
emotional inferno. And in discussions of policies that affect all of our
lives, it might bring us better, more practical solutions sooner. That’s
what this section of the book is about: applying rethinking to
different parts of our lives, so that we can keep learning at every
stage of our lives.
Non Sequitur © 2016 Wiley Ink, Inc. Dist. by
with permission. All rights reserved.
. Reprinted
SOME INCONVENIENT TRUTHS
In 2006, Al Gore starred in a blockbuster film on climate change, An
Inconvenient Truth. It won the Academy Award for Best
Documentary and spawned a wave of activism, motivating
businesses to go green and governments to pass legislation and sign
landmark agreements to protect the planet. History teaches us that it
sometimes takes a combination of preaching, prosecuting, and
politicking to fuel that kind of dramatic swing.
Yet by 2018, only 59 percent of Americans saw climate change as
a major threat—and 16 percent believed it wasn’t a threat at all.
Across many countries in Western Europe and Southeast Asia,
higher percentages of the populations had opened their minds to the
evidence that climate change is a dire problem. In the past decade in
the United States, beliefs about climate change have hardly budged.
This thorny issue is a natural place to explore how we can bring
more complexity into our conversations. Fundamentally, that
involves drawing attention to the nuances that often get overlooked.
It starts with seeking and spotlighting shades of gray.
A fundamental lesson of desirability bias is that our beliefs are
shaped by our motivations. What we believe depends on what we
want to believe. Emotionally, it can be unsettling for anyone to
admit that all life as we know it might be in danger, but Americans
have some additional reasons to be dubious about climate change.
Politically, climate change has been branded in the United States as a
liberal issue; in some conservative circles, merely acknowledging the
fact that it might exist puts people on a fast track to exile. There’s
evidence that higher levels of education predict heightened concern
about climate change among Democrats but dampened concern
among Republicans. Economically, we remain confident that
America will be more resilient in response to a changing climate than
most of the world, and we’re reluctant to sacrifice our current ways
of achieving prosperity. These deep-seated beliefs are hard to
change.
As a psychologist, I want to zoom in on another factor. It’s one
we can all control: the way we communicate about climate change.
Many people believe that preaching with passion and conviction is
necessary for persuasion. A clear example is Al Gore. When he
narrowly lost the U.S. presidential election in 2000, one of the
knocks against him was his energy—or lack thereof. People called
him dry. Boring. Robotic. Fast-forward a few years: his film was
riveting and his own platform skills had evolved dramatically. In
2016, when I watched Gore speak in the red circle at TED, his
language was vivid, his voice pulsated with emotion, and his passion
literally dripped off him in the form of sweat. If a robot was ever
controlling his brain, it short-circuited and left the human in
charge. “Some still doubt that we have the will to act,” he boomed,
“but I say the will to act is itself a renewable resource.” The audience
erupted in a standing ovation, and afterward he was called the Elvis
of TED. If it’s not his communication style that’s failing to reach
people, what is?
At TED, Gore was preaching to the choir: his audience was
heavily progressive. For audiences with more varied beliefs, his
language hasn’t always resonated. In An Inconvenient Truth, Gore
contrasted the “truth” with claims made by “so-called skeptics.” In a
2010 op-ed, he contrasted scientists with “climate deniers.”
This is binary bias in action. It presumes that the world is
divided into two sides: believers and nonbelievers. Only one side can
be right, because there is only one truth. I don’t blame Al Gore for
taking that position; he was presenting rigorous data and
representing the consensus of the scientific community. Because he
was a recovering politician, seeing two sides to an issue must have
been second nature. But when the only available options are black
and white, it’s natural to slip into a mentality of us versus them and
to focus on the sides over the science. For those on the fence, when
forced to choose a side, the emotional, political, and economic
pressures tilt in favor of disengaging or dismissing the problem.
To overcome binary bias, a good starting point is to become
aware of the range of perspectives across a given spectrum. Polls
suggest that on climate change, there are at least six camps of
thought. Believers represent more than half of Americans, but some
are concerned while others are alarmed. The so-called nonbelievers
actually range from cautious to disengaged to doubtful to dismissive.
It’s especially important to distinguish skeptics from deniers.
Skeptics have a healthy scientific stance: They don’t believe
everything they see, hear, or read. They ask critical questions and
update their thinking as they gain access to new information. Deniers
are in the dismissive camp, locked in preacher, prosecutor, or
politician mode: They don’t believe anything that comes from the
other side. They ignore or twist facts to support their predetermined
conclusions. As the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry put it in a plea
to the media, skepticism is “foundational to the scientific method,”
whereas denial is “the a priori rejection of ideas without objective
consideration.”*
The complexity of this spectrum of beliefs is often missing from
coverage of climate change. Although no more than 10 percent of
Americans are dismissive of climate change, it’s these rare deniers
who get the most press. In an analysis of some hundred thousand
media articles on climate change between 2000 and 2016, prominent
climate contrarians received disproportionate coverage: they were
featured 49 percent more often than expert scientists. As a result,
people end up overestimating how common denial is—which in turn
makes them more hesitant to advocate for policies that protect the
environment. When the middle of the spectrum is invisible, the
majority’s will to act vanishes with it. If other people aren’t going to
do anything about it, why should I bother? When they become
aware of just how many people are concerned about climate change,
they’re more prepared to do something about it.
As consumers of information, we have a role to play in
embracing a more nuanced point of view. When we’re reading,
listening, or watching, we can learn to recognize complexity as a
signal of credibility. We can favor content and sources that present
many sides of an issue rather than just one or two. When we come
across simplifying headlines, we can fight our tendency to accept
binaries by asking what additional perspectives are missing between
the extremes.
This applies when we’re the ones producing and communicating
information, too. New research suggests that when journalists
acknowledge the uncertainties around facts on complex issues like
climate change and immigration, it doesn’t undermine their readers’
trust. And multiple experiments have shown that when experts
express doubt, they become more persuasive. When someone
knowledgeable admits uncertainty, it surprises people, and they end
up paying more attention to the substance of the argument.
Of course, a potential challenge of nuance is that it doesn’t seem
to go viral. Attention spans are short: we have only a few seconds to
capture eyeballs with a catchy headline. It’s true that complexity
doesn’t always make for good sound bites, but it does seed great
conversations. And some journalists have found clever ways to
capture it in few words.
A few years ago, the media reported on a study of the cognitive
consequences of coffee consumption. Although their headlines were
drawn from the same data, some newspapers praised the benefits of
coffee, while other outlets warned about the costs:
The actual study showed that older adults who drank a daily cup
or two of coffee had a lower risk of mild cognitive impairment,
relative to abstainers, occasional consumers, and heavier consumers.
If they increased their consumption by another cup or more per day,
they had a higher risk than those who stayed at or below a single cup
a day. Each of the one-sided headlines took seven to twelve words to
mislead the reader about the effects of drinking coffee. A more
accurate headline needed just twelve words to serve up a jolt of
instant complexity:
Imagine if even this kind of minimal nod to complexity appeared
in articles on climate change. Scientists overwhelmingly agree about
its human causes, but even they have a range of views on the actual
effects—and the potential remedies. It’s possible to be alarmed about
the situation while recognizing the variety of ways to improve it.*
Psychologists find that people will ignore or even deny the
existence of a problem if they’re not fond of the solution. Liberals
were more dismissive of the issue of intruder violence when they
read an argument that strict gun control laws could make it difficult
for homeowners to protect themselves. Conservatives were more
receptive to climate science when they read about a green technology
policy proposal than about an emissions restriction proposal.
Featuring shades of gray in discussions of solutions can help to
shift attention from why climate change is a problem to how we can
do something about it. As we’ve seen from the evidence on the
illusion of explanatory depth, asking “how” tends to reduce
polarization, setting the stage for more constructive conversations
about action. Here are examples of headlines in which writers have
hinted at the complexity of the solutions:
I WORK IN THE ENVIRONMENTAL MOVEMENT. I DON’T CARE IF YOU
RECYCLE
CAN PLANTING A TRILLION TREES STOP CLIMATE CHANGE? SCIENTISTS
SAY IT’S A LOT MORE COMPLICATED
SOME CAVEATS AND CONTINGENCIES
If you want to get better at conveying complexity, it’s worth taking a
close look at how scientists communicate. One key step is to include
caveats. It’s rare that a single study or even a series of studies is
conclusive. Researchers typically feature multiple paragraphs about
the limitations of each study in their articles. We see them less as
holes in our work and more as portholes to future discoveries. When
we share the findings with nonscientists, though, we sometimes gloss
over these caveats.
That’s a mistake, according to recent research. In a series of
experiments, psychologists demonstrated that when news reports
about science included caveats, they succeeded in capturing readers’
interest and keeping their minds open. Take a study suggesting that a
poor diet accelerates aging. Readers were just as engaged in the story
—but more flexible in their beliefs—when it mentioned that scientists
remained hesitant to draw strong causal conclusions given the
number of factors that can affect aging. It even helped just to note
that scientists believed more work needed to be done in this area.
We can also convey complexity by highlighting contingencies.
Every empirical finding raises unanswered questions about when
and where results will be replicated, nullified, or reversed.
Contingencies are all the places and populations where an effect may
change.
Consider diversity: although headlines often say “Diversity is
good,” the evidence is full of contingencies. Although diversity of
background and thought has the potential to help groups think more
broadly and process information more deeply, that potential is
realized in some situations but not others. New research reveals that
people are more likely to promote diversity and inclusion when the
message is more nuanced (and more accurate): “Diversity is good,
but it isn’t easy.”* Acknowledging complexity doesn’t make speakers
and writers less convincing; it makes them more credible. It doesn’t
lose viewers and readers; it maintains their engagement while
stoking their curiosity.
In social science, rather than cherry-picking information to fit
our existing narratives, we’re trained to ask whether we should
rethink and revise those narratives. When we find evidence that
doesn’t fit neatly into our belief systems, we’re expected to share it
anyway.* In some of my past writing for the public, though, I regret
not having done enough to emphasize areas where evidence was
incomplete or conflicting. I sometimes shied away from discussing
mixed results because I didn’t want to leave readers confused.
Research suggests that many writers fall into the same trap, caught
up in trying to “maintain a consistent narrative rather than an
accurate record.”
A fascinating example is the divide around emotional
intelligence. On one extreme is Daniel Goleman, who popularized the
concept. He preaches that emotional intelligence matters more for
performance than cognitive ability (IQ) and accounts for “nearly 90
percent” of success in leadership jobs. At the other extreme is Jordan
Peterson, writing that “There is NO SUCH THING AS EQ” and
prosecuting emotional intelligence as “a fraudulent concept, a fad, a
convenient band-wagon, a corporate marketing scheme.”
Both men hold doctorates in psychology, but neither seems
particularly interested in creating an accurate record. If Peterson had
bothered to read the comprehensive meta-analyses of studies
spanning nearly two hundred jobs, he’d have discovered that—
contrary to his claims—emotional intelligence is real and it does
matter. Emotional intelligence tests predict performance even after
controlling for IQ and personality. If Goleman hadn’t ignored those
same data, he’d have learned that if you want to predict performance
across jobs, IQ is more than twice as important as emotional
intelligence (which accounts for only 3 to 8 percent of performance).
I think they’re both missing the point. Instead of arguing about
whether emotional intelligence is meaningful, we should be focusing
on the contingencies that explain when it’s more and less
consequential. It turns out that emotional intelligence is beneficial in
jobs that involve dealing with emotions, but less relevant—and
maybe even detrimental—in work where emotions are less central. If
you’re a real estate agent, a customer service representative, or a
counselor, being skilled at perceiving, understanding, and managing
emotions can help you support your clients and address their
problems. If you’re a mechanic or an accountant, being an emotional
genius is less useful and could even become a distraction. If you’re
fixing my car or doing my taxes, I’d rather you didn’t pay too much
attention to my emotions.
In an effort to set the record straight, I wrote a short LinkedIn
post arguing that emotional intelligence is overrated. I did my best to
follow my own guidelines for complexity:
Nuance: This isn’t to say that emotional intelligence is
useless.
Caveats: As better tests of emotional intelligence are
designed, our knowledge may change.
Contingencies: For now, the best available evidence suggests
that emotional intelligence is not a panacea. Let’s recognize
it for what it is: a set of skills that can be beneficial in
situations where emotional information is rich or vital.
Over a thousand comments poured in, and I was pleasantly
surprised that many reacted enthusiastically to the complexified
message. Some mentioned that nothing is either/or and that data
can help us reexamine even our closely held beliefs. Others were
downright hostile. They turned a blind eye to the evidence and
insisted that emotional intelligence was the sine qua non of success.
It was as if they belonged to an emotional intelligence cult.
From time to time I’ve run into idea cults—groups that stir up a
batch of oversimplified intellectual Kool-Aid and recruit followers to
serve it widely. They preach the merits of their pet concept and
prosecute anyone who calls for nuance or complexity. In the area of
health, idea cults defend detox diets and cleanses long after they’ve
been exposed as snake oil. In education, there are idea cults around
learning styles—the notion that instruction should be tailored to each
student’s preference for learning through auditory, visual, or
kinesthetic modes. Some teachers are determined to tailor their
instruction accordingly despite decades of evidence that although
students might enjoy listening, reading, or doing, they don’t actually
learn better that way. In psychology, I’ve inadvertently offended
members of idea cults when I’ve shared evidence that meditation
isn’t the only way to prevent stress or promote mindfulness; that
when it comes to reliability and validity, the Myers-Briggs
personality tool falls somewhere between a horoscope and a heart
monitor; and that being more authentic can sometimes make us less
successful. If you find yourself saying ____ is always good or
____ is never bad, you may be a member of an idea cult.
Appreciating complexity reminds us that no behavior is always
effective and that all cures have unintended consequences.
xkcd.com
In the moral philosophy of John Rawls, the veil of ignorance asks
us to judge the justice of a society by whether we’d join it without
knowing our place in it. I think the scientist’s veil of ignorance is to
ask whether we’d accept the results of a study based on the methods
involved, without knowing what the conclusion will be.
MIXED FEELINGS
In polarized discussions, a common piece of advice is to take the
other side’s perspective. In theory, putting ourselves in another
person’s shoes enables us to walk in lockstep with them. In practice,
though, it’s not that simple.
In a pair of experiments, randomly assigning people to reflect on
the intentions and interests of their political opposites made them
less receptive to rethinking their own attitudes on health care and
universal basic income. Across twenty-five experiments, imagining
other people’s perspectives failed to elicit more accurate insights—
and occasionally made participants more confident in their own
inaccurate judgments. Perspective-taking consistently fails because
we’re terrible mind readers. We’re just guessing.
If we don’t understand someone, we can’t have a eureka moment
by imagining his perspective. Polls show that Democrats
underestimate the number of Republicans who recognize the
prevalence of racism and sexism—and Republicans underestimate
the number of Democrats who are proud to be Americans and
oppose open borders. The greater the distance between us and an
adversary, the more likely we are to oversimplify their actual motives
and invent explanations that stray far from their reality. What works
is not perspective-taking but perspective-seeking: actually talking to
people to gain insight into the nuances of their views. That’s what
good scientists do: instead of drawing conclusions about people
based on minimal clues, they test their hypotheses by striking up
conversations.
For a long time, I believed that the best way to make those
conversations less polarizing was to leave emotions out of them. If
only we could keep our feelings off the table, we’d all be more open to
rethinking. Then I read evidence that complicated my thinking.
It turns out that even if we disagree strongly with someone on a
social issue, when we discover that she cares deeply about the issue,
we trust her more. We might still dislike her, but we see her passion
for a principle as a sign of integrity. We reject the belief but grow to
respect the person behind it.
It can help to make that respect explicit at the start of a
conversation. In one experiment, if an ideological opponent merely
began by acknowledging that “I have a lot of respect for people like
you who stand by their principles,” people were less likely to see her
as an adversary—and showed her more generosity.
When Peter Coleman brings people together in his Difficult
Conversations Lab, he plays them the recording of their discussions
afterward. What he wants to learn is how they were feeling, moment
by moment, as they listen to themselves. After studying over five
hundred of these conversations, he found that the unproductive ones
feature a more limited set of both positive and negative emotions, as
illustrated below in the image on the left. People get trapped in
emotional simplicity, with one or two dominant feelings.
As you can see with the duo on the right, the productive
conversations cover a much more varied spectrum of emotions.
They’re not less emotional—they’re more emotionally complex. At
one point, people might be angry about the other person’s views, but
by the next minute they’re curious to learn more. Soon they could be
shifting into anxiety and then excitement about considering a new
perspective. Sometimes they even stumble into the joy of being
wrong.
In a productive conversation, people treat their feelings as a
rough draft. Like art, emotions are works in progress. It rarely serves
us well to frame our first sketch. As we gain perspective, we revise
what we feel. Sometimes we even start over from scratch.
What stands in the way of rethinking isn’t the expression of
emotion; it’s a restricted range of emotion. So how do we infuse our
charged conversations with greater emotional variety—and thereby
greater potential for mutual understanding and rethinking?
It helps to remember that we can fall victim to binary bias with
emotions, not only with issues. Just as the spectrum of beliefs on
charged topics is much more complex than two extremes, our
emotions are often more mixed than we realize.* If you come across
evidence that you might be wrong about the best path to gun safety,
you can simultaneously feel upset by and intrigued with what you’ve
learned. If you feel wronged by someone with a different set of
beliefs, you can be simultaneously angry about your past interactions
and hopeful about a future relationship. If someone says your actions
haven’t lived up to your antiracist rhetoric, you can experience both
defensiveness (I’m a good person!) and remorse (I could’ve done a
lot more).
In the spring of 2020, a Black man named Christian Cooper was
bird-watching in Central Park when a white woman walked by with
her dog. He respectfully asked her to put the dog on a leash, as the
nearby signs required. When she refused, he stayed calm and started
filming her on his phone. She responded by informing him that she
was going to call the police and “tell them there’s an African
American man threatening my life.” She went on to do exactly that
with a 911 operator.
When the video of the encounter went viral, the continuum of
emotional reactions on social media rightfully spanned from moral
outrage to sheer rage. The incident called to mind a painful history of
false criminal accusations made against Black men by white women,
which often ended with devastating consequences. It was appalling
that the woman didn’t leash her dog—and her prejudice.
“I’m not a racist. I did not mean to harm that man in any way,”
the woman declared in her public apology. “I think I was just scared.”
Her simple explanation overlooks the complex emotions that fueled
her actions. She could have stopped to ask why she had been afraid—
what views about Black men had led her to feel threatened in a polite
conversation? She could have paused to consider why she had felt
entitled to lie to the police—what power dynamics had made her feel
this was acceptable?
Her simple denial overlooks the complex reality that racism is a
function of our actions, not merely our intentions. As historian
Ibram X. Kendi writes, “Racist and antiracist are not fixed identities.
We can be a racist one minute and an antiracist the next.” Humans,
like polarizing issues, rarely come in binaries.
When asked whether he accepted her apology, Christian Cooper
refused to make a simple judgment, offering a nuanced assessment:
I think her apology is sincere. I’m not sure if in that
apology she recognizes that while she may not be or consider
herself a racist, that particular act was definitely racist. . . .
Granted, it was a stressful situation, a sudden situation,
maybe a moment of spectacularly poor judgment, but she
went there. . . .
Is she a racist? I can’t answer that—only she can answer
that . . . going forward with how she conducts herself, and
how she chooses to reflect on the situation and examine it.
By expressing his mixed emotions and his uncertainty about how
to judge the woman, Christian signaled his willingness to rethink the
situation and encouraged others to rethink their own reactions. You
might even be experiencing some complex emotions as you read this.
It shouldn’t be up to the victim to inject complexity into a
difficult conversation. Rethinking should start with the offender. If
the woman had taken responsibility for reevaluating her beliefs and
behaviors, she might have become an example to others who
recognized a bit of themselves in her reaction. Although she couldn’t
change what she’d already done, by recognizing the complex power
dynamics that breed and perpetuate systemic racism, she might have
spurred deeper discussions of the range of possible steps toward
justice.
Charged conversations cry out for nuance. When we’re
preaching, prosecuting, or politicking, the complexity of reality can
seem like an inconvenient truth. In scientist mode, it can be an
invigorating truth—it means there are new opportunities for
understanding and for progress.
CHAPTER 9
Rewriting the Textbook
Teaching Students to Question Knowledge
No schooling was allowed to interfere with my education.
—
A
decade ago, if you had told Erin McCarthy she would become a
teacher, she would have laughed. When she graduated from
college, the last thing she wanted to do was teach. She was
fascinated by history but bored by her social studies classes.
Searching for a way to breathe life into overlooked objects and
forgotten events, Erin started her career working in museums.
Before long, she found herself writing a resource manual for
teachers, leading school tours, and engaging students in interactive
programs. She realized that the enthusiasm she saw on field trips
was missing in too many classrooms, and she decided to do
something about it.
For the past eight years, Erin has taught social studies in the
Milwaukee area. Her mission is to cultivate curiosity about the past,
but also to motivate students to update their knowledge in the
present. In 2020, she was named Wisconsin’s Teacher of the Year.
One day, an eighth grader complained that the reading
assignment from a history textbook was inaccurate. If you’re a
teacher, that kind of criticism could be a nightmare. Using an
outdated textbook would be a sign that you don’t know your
material, and it would be embarrassing if your students noticed the
error before you did.
But Erin had assigned that particular reading intentionally. She
collects old history books because she enjoys seeing how the stories
we tell change over time, and she decided to give her students part of
a textbook from 1940. Some of them just accepted the information it
presented at face value. Through years of education, they had come
to take it for granted that textbooks told the truth. Others were
shocked by errors and omissions. It was ingrained in their minds
that their readings were filled with incontrovertible facts. The lesson
led them to start thinking like scientists and questioning what they
were learning: whose story was included, whose was excluded, and
what were they missing if only one or two perspectives were shared?
After opening her students’ eyes to the fact that knowledge can
evolve, Erin’s next step was to show them that it’s always evolving.
To set up a unit on expansion in the West, she created her own
textbook section describing what it’s like to be a middle-school
student today. All the protagonists were women and girls, and all the
generic pronouns were female. In the first year she introduced the
material, a student raised his hand to point out that the boys were
missing. “But there’s one boy,” Erin replied. “Boys were around.
They just weren’t doing anything important.” It was an aha moment
for the student: he suddenly realized what it was like for an entire
group to be marginalized for hundreds of years.
My favorite assignment of Erin’s is her final one. As a passionate
champion of inquiry-based learning, she sends her eighth graders off
to do self-directed research in which they inspect, investigate,
interrogate, and interpret. Their active learning culminates in a
group project: they pick a chapter from their textbook, choosing a
time period that interests them and a theme in history that they see
as underrepresented. Then they go off to rewrite it.
One group took on the civil rights chapter for failing to cover the
original March on Washington, which was called off at the last
minute in the early 1940s but inspired Martin Luther King Jr.’s
historic march two decades later. Other groups revised the chapter
on World War II to include the infantry regiments of Hispanic
soldiers and second-generation Japanese soldiers who fought for the
U.S. Army. “It’s a huge light-bulb moment,” Erin told me.
Even if you’re not a teacher by profession, you probably have
roles in which you spend time educating others—whether as a
parent, a mentor, a friend, or a colleague. In fact, every time we try to
help someone think again, we’re doing a kind of education. Whether
we do our instruction in a classroom or in a boardroom, in an office
or at our kitchen table, there are ways to make rethinking central to
what—and how—we teach.
With so much emphasis placed on imparting knowledge and
building confidence, many teachers don’t do enough to encourage
students to question themselves and one another. To figure out what
it takes to change that mindset, I tracked down some extraordinary
educators who foster rethinking cycles by instilling intellectual
humility, disseminating doubt, and cultivating curiosity. I also tested
a few of my own ideas by turning my classroom into something of a
living lab.
LEARNING, INTERRUPTED
Looking back on my own early education, one of my biggest
disappointments is that I never got to fully experience the biggest
upheavals in science. Long before it ever occurred to me to be
curious about the cosmos, my teachers started demystifying it in
kindergarten. I often wonder how I would have felt if I was a
teenager when I first learned that we don’t live on a static, flat disc,
but on a spinning, moving sphere.
I hope I would have been stunned, and that disbelief would have
quickly given way to curiosity and eventually the awe of discovery
and the joy of being wrong. I also suspect it would have been a lifechanging lesson in confident humility. If I could be that mistaken
about what was under my own two feet, how many other so-called
truths were actually question marks? Sure, I knew that many earlier
generations of humans had gotten it wrong, but there’s a huge
difference between learning about other people’s false beliefs and
actually learning to unbelieve things ourselves.
I realize this thought experiment is wildly impractical. It’s hard
enough to keep kids in the dark about Santa Claus or the Tooth
Fairy. Even if we could pull off such a delay, there’s a risk that some
students would seize and freeze on what they learned early on. They
could become trapped in an overconfidence cycle where pride in false
knowledge fuels conviction, and confirmation and desirability biases
lead to validation. Before you know it, we might have a whole nation
of flat-earthers.
Evidence shows that if false scientific beliefs aren’t addressed in
elementary school, they become harder to change later. “Learning
counterintuitive scientific ideas [is] akin to becoming a fluent
speaker of a second language,” psychologist Deborah Kelemen
writes. It’s “a task that becomes increasingly difficult the longer it is
delayed, and one that is almost never achieved with only piecemeal
instruction and infrequent practice.” That’s what kids really need:
frequent practice at unlearning, especially when it comes to the
mechanisms of how cause and effect work.
In the field of history education, there’s a growing movement to
ask questions that don’t have a single right answer. In a curriculum
developed at Stanford, high school students are encouraged to
critically examine what really caused the Spanish-American War,
whether the New Deal was a success, and why the Montgomery bus
boycott was a watershed moment. Some teachers even send students
out to interview people with whom they disagree. The focus is less on
being right, and more on building the skills to consider different
views and argue productively about them.
That doesn’t mean all interpretations are accepted as valid.
When the son of a Holocaust survivor came to her class, Erin
McCarthy told her students that some people denied the existence of
the Holocaust, and taught them to examine the evidence and reject
those false claims. This is part of a broader movement to teach kids
to think like fact-checkers: the guidelines include (1) “interrogate
information instead of simply consuming it,” (2) “reject rank and
popularity as a proxy for reliability,” and (3) “understand that the
sender of information is often not its source.”
These principles are valuable beyond the classroom. At our
family dinner table, we sometimes hold myth-busting discussions.
My wife and I have shared how we learned in school that Pluto was a
planet (not true anymore) and Columbus discovered America (never
true). Our kids have taught us that King Tut probably didn’t die in a
chariot accident and gleefully explained that when sloths do their
version of a fart, the gas comes not from their behinds but from their
mouths.
Rethinking needs to become a regular habit. Unfortunately,
traditional methods of education don’t always allow students to form
that habit.
THE DUMBSTRUCK EFFECT
It’s week twelve of physics class, and you get to attend a couple of
sessions with a new, highly rated instructor to learn about static
equilibrium and fluids. The first session is on statics; it’s a lecture.
The second is on fluids, and it’s an active-learning session. One of
your roommates has a different, equally popular instructor who does
the opposite—using active learning for statics and lecturing on fluids.
In both cases the content and the handouts are identical; the
only difference is the delivery method. During the lecture the
instructor presents slides, gives explanations, does demonstrations,
and solves sample problems, and you take notes on the handouts. In
the active-learning session, instead of doing the example problems
himself, the instructor sends the class off to figure them out in small
groups, wandering around to ask questions and offer tips before
walking the class through the solution. At the end, you fill out a
survey.
In this experiment the topic doesn’t matter: the teaching method
is what shapes your experience. I expected active learning to win the
day, but the data suggest that you and your roommate will both enjoy
the subject more when it’s delivered by lecture. You’ll also rate the
instructor who lectures as more effective—and you’ll be more likely
to say you wish all your physics courses were taught that way.
Upon reflection, the appeal of dynamic lectures shouldn’t be
surprising. For generations, people have admired the rhetorical
eloquence of poets like Maya Angelou, politicians like John F.
Kennedy Jr. and Ronald Reagan, preachers like Martin Luther King
Jr., and teachers like Richard Feynman. Today we live in a golden
age of spellbinding speaking, where great orators engage and educate
from platforms with unprecedented reach. Creatives used to share
their methods in small communities; now they can accumulate
enough YouTube and Instagram subscribers to populate a small
country. Pastors once gave sermons to hundreds at church; now they
can reach hundreds of thousands over the internet in megachurches.
Professors used to teach small enough classes that they could spend
individual time with each student; now their lessons can be
broadcast to millions through online courses.
It’s clear that these lectures are entertaining and informative.
The question is whether they’re the ideal method of teaching. In the
physics experiment, the students took tests to gauge how much they
had learned about statics and fluids. Despite enjoying the lectures
more, they actually gained more knowledge and skill from the activelearning session. It required more mental effort, which made it less
fun but led to deeper understanding.
For a long time, I believed that we learn more when we’re having
fun. This research convinced me I was wrong. It also reminded me of
my favorite physics teacher, who got stellar reviews for letting us
play Ping-Pong in class, but didn’t quite make the coefficient of
friction stick.
Active learning has impact far beyond physics. A meta-analysis
compared the effects of lecturing and active learning on students’
mastery of the material, cumulating 225 studies with over 46,000
undergraduates in science, technology, engineering, and math
(STEM). Active-learning methods included group problem solving,
worksheets, and tutorials. On average, students scored half a letter
grade worse under traditional lecturing than through active learning
—and students were 1.55 times more likely to fail in classes with
traditional lecturing. The researchers estimate that if the students
who failed in lecture courses had participated in active learning,
more than $3.5 million in tuition could have been saved.
It’s not hard to see why a boring lecture would fail, but even
captivating lectures can fall short for a less obvious, more concerning
reason. Lectures aren’t designed to accommodate dialogue or
disagreement; they turn students into passive receivers of
information rather than active thinkers. In the above meta-analysis,
lecturing was especially ineffective in debunking known
misconceptions—in leading students to think again. And
experiments have shown that when a speaker delivers an inspiring
message, the audience scrutinizes the material less carefully and
forgets more of the content—even while claiming to remember more
of it.
Social scientists have called this phenomenon the awestruck
effect, but I think it’s better described as the dumbstruck effect. The
sage-on-the-stage often preaches new thoughts, but rarely teaches us
how to think for ourselves. Thoughtful lecturers might prosecute
inaccurate arguments and tell us what to think instead, but they
don’t necessarily show us how to rethink moving forward.
Charismatic speakers can put us under a political spell, under which
we follow them to gain their approval or affiliate with their tribe. We
should be persuaded by the substance of an argument, not the shiny
package in which it’s wrapped.
To be clear, I’m not suggesting eliminating lectures altogether. I
love watching TED talks and have even learned to enjoy giving them.
It was attending brilliant lectures that first piqued my curiosity about
becoming a teacher, and I’m not opposed to doing some lecturing in
my own classes. I just think it’s a problem that lectures remain the
dominant method of teaching in secondary and higher education.
Expect a lecture on that soon.
In North American universities, more than half of STEM
professors spend at least 80 percent of their time lecturing, just over
a quarter incorporate bits of interactivity, and fewer than a fifth use
truly student-centered methods that involve active learning. In high
schools it seems that half of teachers lecture most or all of the time.*
Lectures are not always the best method of learning, and they are not
enough to develop students into lifelong learners. If you spend all of
your school years being fed information and are never given the
opportunity to question it, you won’t develop the tools for rethinking
that you need in life.
Steve Macone/The New Yorker Collection/The Cartoon Bank; © Condé Nast
THE UNBEARABLE LIGHTNESS OF REPEATING
There’s only one class I regret missing in college. It was taught by a
philosopher named Robert Nozick. One of his ideas became famous
thanks to the movie The Matrix: in the 1970s, Nozick introduced a
thought experiment about whether people would choose to enter an
“experience machine” that could provide infinite pleasure but
remove them from real life.* In his classroom, Nozick created his
own version of an experience machine: he insisted on teaching a new
class every year. “I do my thinking through the courses I give,” he
said.
Nozick taught one course on truth; another on philosophy and
neuroscience; a third on Socrates, Buddha, and Jesus; a fourth on
thinking about thinking; and a fifth on the Russian Revolution. In
four decades of teaching, he taught only one class a second time: it
was on the good life. “Presenting a completely polished and workedout view doesn’t give students a feel for what it’s like to do original
work in philosophy and to see it happen, to catch on to doing it,” he
explained. Sadly, before I could take one of his courses, he died of
cancer.
What I found so inspiring about Nozick’s approach was that he
wasn’t content for students to learn from him. He wanted them to
learn with him. Every time he tackled a new topic, he would have the
opportunity to rethink his existing views on it. He was a remarkable
role model for changing up our familiar methods of teaching—and
learning. When I started teaching, I wanted to adopt some of his
principles. I wasn’t prepared to inflict an entire semester of halfbaked ideas on my students, so I set a benchmark: every year I would
aim to throw out 20 percent of my class and replace it with new
material. If I was doing new thinking every year, we could all start
rethinking together.
With the other 80 percent of the material, though, I found myself
failing. I was teaching a semester-long class on organizational
behavior for juniors and seniors. When I introduced evidence, I
wasn’t giving them the space to rethink it. After years of wrestling
with this problem, it dawned on me that I could create a new
assignment to teach rethinking. I assigned students to work in small
groups to record their own mini-podcasts or mini–TED talks. Their
charge was to question a popular practice, to champion an idea that
went against the grain of conventional wisdom, or to challenge
principles covered in class.
As they started working on the project, I noticed a surprising
pattern. The students who struggled the most were the straight-A
students—the perfectionists. It turns out that although perfectionists
are more likely than their peers to ace school, they don’t perform any
better than their colleagues at work. This tracks with evidence that,
across a wide range of industries, grades are not a strong predictor of
job performance.
Achieving excellence in school often requires mastering old ways
of thinking. Building an influential career demands new ways of
thinking. In a classic study of highly accomplished architects, the
most creative ones graduated with a B average. Their straight-A
counterparts were so determined to be right that they often failed to
take the risk of rethinking the orthodoxy. A similar pattern emerged
in a study of students who graduated at the top of their class.
“Valedictorians aren’t likely to be the future’s visionaries,” education
researcher Karen Arnold explains. “They typically settle into the
system instead of shaking it up.”
That’s what I saw with my straight-A students: they were
terrified of being wrong. To give them a strong incentive to take
some risks, I made the assignment worth 20 percent of their final
grade. I had changed the rules: now they were being rewarded for
rethinking instead of regurgitating. I wasn’t sure if that incentive
would work until I reviewed the work of a trio of straight-A students.
They gave their mini–TED talk about the problems with TED talks,
pointing out the risks of reinforcing short attention spans and
privileging superficial polish over deep insight. Their presentation
was so thoughtful and entertaining that I played it for the entire
class. “If you have the courage to stand up to the trend towards glib,
seamless answers,” they deadpanned as we laughed, “then stop
watching this video right now, and do some real research, like we
did.”
I made the assignment a staple of the course from then on. The
following year I wanted to go further in rethinking the content and
format of my class. In a typical three-hour class, I would spend no
more than twenty to thirty minutes lecturing. The rest is active
learning—students make decisions in simulations and negotiate in
role-plays, and then we debrief, discuss, debate, and problem solve.
My mistake was treating the syllabus as if it were a formal contract:
once I finalized it in September, it was effectively set in stone. I
decided it was time to change that and invite the students to rethink
part of the structure of the class itself.
On my next syllabus, I deliberately left one class session
completely blank. Halfway through the semester, I invited the
students to work in small groups to develop and pitch an idea for
how we should spend that open day. Then they voted.
One of the most popular ideas came from Lauren McCann, who
suggested a creative step toward helping students recognize that
rethinking was a useful skill—and one they had already been using in
college. She invited her classmates to write letters to their freshmen
selves covering what they wish they had known back then. The
students encouraged their younger selves to stay open to different
majors, instead of declaring the first one that erased their
uncertainty. To be less obsessed with grades, and more focused on
relationships. To explore different career possibilities, rather than
committing too soon to the one that promised the most pay or
prestige.
Lauren collected letters from dozens of students to launch a
website, Dear Penn Freshmen. Within twenty-four hours,
dearpennfresh.com had over ten thousand visits, and a half dozen
schools were starting their own versions to help students rethink
their academic, social, and professional choices.
This practice can extend far beyond the classroom. As we
approach any life transition—whether it’s a first job, a second
marriage, or a third child—we can pause to ask people what they
wish they’d known before they went through that experience. Once
we’re on the other side of it, we can share what we ourselves should
have rethought.
It’s been demonstrated repeatedly that one of the best ways to
learn is to teach. It wasn’t until I let my students design a day of class
that I truly understood how much they had to teach one another—
and me. They were rethinking not just what they learned, but whom
they could learn from.
The following year, the class’s favorite idea took that rethinking a
step further: the students hosted a day of “passion talks” on which
anyone could teach the class about something he or she loved. We
learned how to beatbox and design buildings that mesh with nature
and make the world more allergy safe. From that point on, sharing
passions has been part of class participation. All the students give a
passion talk as a way of introducing themselves to their peers. Year
after year, they tell me that it injects a heightened level of curiosity
into the room, leaving them eager to soak up insights from each of
their classmates.
www.CartoonCollections.com
JACK OF ROUGH DRAFTS, MASTER OF CRAFTS
When I asked a handful of education pioneers to name the best
teacher of rethinking they’ve ever encountered, I kept hearing the
same name: Ron Berger. If you invited Ron over for dinner, he’s the
kind of person who would notice that one of your chairs was broken,
ask if you had some tools handy, and fix it on the spot.
For most of his career, Ron was a public-elementary-school
teacher in rural Massachusetts. His nurse, his plumber, and his local
firefighters were all former students. During the summers and on
weekends, he worked as a carpenter. Ron has devoted his life to
teaching students an ethic of excellence. Mastering a craft, in his
experience, is about constantly revising our thinking. Hands-on
craftsmanship is the foundation for his classroom philosophy.
Ron wanted his students to experience the joy of discovery, so he
didn’t start by teaching them established knowledge. He began the
school year by presenting them with “grapples”—problems to work
through in phases. The approach was think-pair-share: the kids
started individually, updated their ideas in small groups, and then
presented their thoughts to the rest of the class, arriving at solutions
together. Instead of introducing existing taxonomies of animals, for
example, Ron had them develop their own categories first. Some
students classified animals by whether they walked on land, swam in
water, or flew through the air; others arranged them according to
color, size, or diet. The lesson was that scientists always have many
options, and their frameworks are useful in some ways but arbitrary
in others.
When students confront complex problems, they often feel
confused. A teacher’s natural impulse is to rescue them as quickly as
possible so they don’t feel lost or incompetent. Yet psychologists find
that one of the hallmarks of an open mind is responding to confusion
with curiosity and interest. One student put it eloquently: “I need
time for my confusion.” Confusion can be a cue that there’s new
territory to be explored or a fresh puzzle to be solved.
Ron wasn’t content to deliver lessons that erased confusion. He
wanted students to embrace confusion. His vision was for them to
become leaders of their own learning, much like they would in “do it
yourself” (DIY) craft projects. He started encouraging students to
think like young scientists: they would identify problems, develop
hypotheses, and design their own experiments to test them. His sixth
graders went around the community to test local homes for radon
gas. His third graders created their own maps of amphibian habitats.
His first graders got their own group of snails to take care of, and
went on to test which of over 140 foods they liked—and whether they
preferred hot or cold, dark or light, and wet or dry environments.
For architecture and engineering lessons, Ron had his students
create blueprints for a house. When he required them to do at least
four different drafts, other teachers warned him that younger
students would become discouraged. Ron disagreed—he had already
tested the concept with kindergarteners and first graders in art.
Rather than asking them to simply draw a house, he announced,
“We’ll be doing four different versions of a drawing of a house.”
Some students didn’t stop there; many wound up deciding to do
eight or ten drafts. The students had a support network of classmates
cheering them on in their efforts. “Quality means rethinking,
reworking, and polishing,” Ron reflects. “They need to feel they will
be celebrated, not ridiculed, for going back to the drawing board. . . .
They soon began complaining if I didn’t allow them to do more than
one version.”
Ron wanted to teach his students to revise their thinking based
on input from others, so he turned the classroom into a challenge
network. Every week—and sometimes every day—the entire class
would do a critique session. One format was a gallery critique: Ron
put everyone’s work on display, sent students around the room to
observe, and then facilitated a discussion of what they saw as
excellent and why. This method wasn’t used only for art and science
projects; for a writing assignment, they would evaluate a sentence or
a paragraph. The other format was an in-depth critique: for a single
session, the class would focus on the work of one student or group.
The authors would explain their goals and where they needed help,
and Ron guided the class through a discussion of strengths and areas
for development. He encouraged students to be specific and kind: to
critique the work rather than the author. He taught them to avoid
preaching and prosecuting: since they were sharing their subjective
opinions, not objective assessments, they should say “I think” rather
than “This isn’t good.” He invited them to show humility and
curiosity, framing their suggestions in terms of questions like “I’d
love to hear why . . .” and “Have you considered . . .”
The class didn’t just critique projects. Each day they would
discuss what excellence looked like. With each new project they
updated their criteria. Along with rethinking their own work, they
were learning to continually rethink their standards. To help them
further evolve those standards, Ron regularly brought in outside
experts. Local architects and scientists would come in to offer their
own critiques, and the class would incorporate their principles and
vocabularies into future discussions. Long after they’d moved on to
middle and high school, it was not uncommon for former students to
visit Ron’s class and ask for a critique of their work.
As soon as I connected with Ron Berger, I couldn’t help but wish
I had been able to take one of his classes. It wasn’t because I had
suffered from a lack of exceptional teachers. It was because I had
never had the privilege of being in a classroom with a culture like his,
with a whole room of students dedicated to questioning themselves
and one another.
Ron now spends his days speaking, writing, teaching a course for
teachers at Harvard, and consulting with schools. He’s the chief
academic officer of EL Education, an organization dedicated to
reimagining how teaching and learning take place in schools. Ron
and his colleagues work directly with 150 schools and develop
curricula that have reached millions of students.
At one of their schools in Idaho, a student named Austin was
assigned to make a scientifically accurate drawing of a butterfly. This
is his first draft:
Austin’s classmates formed a critique group. They gave him two
rounds of suggestions for changing the shape of the wings, and he
produced his second and third drafts. The critique group pointed out
that the wings were uneven and that they’d become round again.
Austin wasn’t discouraged. On his next revision, the group
encouraged him to fill in the pattern on the wings.
For the final draft, Austin was ready to color it in. When Ron
showed the completed drawing to a roomful of elementary school
students in Maine, they gasped in awe at his progress and his final
product.
I gasped, too, because Austin made these drawings when he was
in first grade.
Seeing a six-year-old undergo that kind of metamorphosis made
me think again about how quickly children can become comfortable
rethinking and revising. Ever since, I’ve encouraged our kids to do
multiple drafts of their own drawings. As excited as they were to see
their first draft hanging on the wall, they’re that much prouder of
their fourth version.
Few of us will have the good fortune to learn to draw a butterfly
with Ron Berger or rewrite a textbook with Erin McCarthy. Yet all of
us have the opportunity to teach more like them. Whomever we’re
educating, we can express more humility, exude more curiosity, and
introduce the children in our lives to the infectious joy of discovery.
I believe that good teachers introduce new thoughts, but great
teachers introduce new ways of thinking. Collecting a teacher’s
knowledge may help us solve the challenges of the day, but
understanding how a teacher thinks can help us navigate the
challenges of a lifetime. Ultimately, education is more than the
information we accumulate in our heads. It’s the habits we develop
as we keep revising our drafts and the skills we build to keep
learning.
CHAPTER 10
That’s Not the Way We’ve Always
Done It
Building Cultures of Learning at Work
If only it weren’t for the people . . . earth would be an
engineer’s paradise.
—
A
s an avid scuba diver, Luca Parmitano was familiar with the
risks of drowning. He just didn’t realize it could happen in
outer space.
Luca had just become the youngest astronaut ever to take a long
trip to the International Space Station. In July 2013, the thirty-sixyear-old Italian astronaut completed his first spacewalk, spending six
hours running experiments, moving equipment, and setting up
power and data cables. Now, a week later, Luca and another
astronaut, Chris Cassidy, were heading out for a second walk to
continue their work and do some maintenance. As they prepared to
leave the airlock, they could see the Earth 250 miles below.
After forty-four minutes in space, Luca felt something strange:
the back of his head seemed to be wet. He wasn’t sure where the
water was coming from. It wasn’t just a nuisance; it could cut off
communication by shorting out his microphone or earphones. He
reported the problem to Mission Control in Houston, and Chris
asked if he was sweating. “I am sweating,” Luca said, “but it feels like
a lot of water. It’s not going anywhere, it’s just in my Snoopy cap.
Just FYI.” He went back to work.
The officer in charge of spacewalks, Karina Eversley, knew
something was wrong. That’s not normal, she thought, and quickly
recruited a team of experts to compile questions for Luca. Was the
amount of liquid increasing? Luca couldn’t tell. Was he sure it was
water? When he stuck out his tongue to capture a few of the drops
that were floating in his helmet, the taste was metallic.
Mission Control made the call to terminate the spacewalk early.
Luca and Chris had to split up to follow their tethers, which were
routed in opposite directions. To get around an antenna, Luca
flipped over. Suddenly, he couldn’t see clearly or breathe through his
nose—globs of water were covering his eyes and filling his nostrils.
The water was continuing to accumulate, and if it reached his mouth
he could drown. His only hope was to navigate quickly back to the
airlock. As the sun set, Luca was surrounded by darkness, with only a
small headlight to guide him. Then his comms went down, too—he
couldn’t hear himself or anyone else speak.
Luca managed to find his way back to the outer hatch of the
airlock, using his memory and the tension in his tether. He was still
in grave danger: before he could remove his helmet, he would have to
wait for Chris to close the hatch and repressurize the airlock. For
several agonizing minutes of silence, it was unclear whether he
would survive. When it was finally safe to remove his helmet, a quart
and a half of water was in it, but Luca was alive. Months later, the
incident would be called the “scariest wardrobe malfunction in NASA
history.”
The technical updates followed swiftly. The spacesuit engineers
traced the leak to a fan/pump/separator, which they replaced
moving forward. They also added a breathing tube that works like a
snorkel and a pad to absorb water inside the helmet. Yet the biggest
error wasn’t technical—it was human.
When Luca had returned from his first spacewalk a week earlier,
he had noticed some droplets of water in his helmet. He and Chris
assumed they were the result of a leak in the bag that provided
drinking water in his suit, and the crew in Houston agreed. Just to be
safe, they replaced the bag, but that was the end of the discussion.
The space station chief engineer, Chris Hansen, led the eventual
investigation into what had gone wrong with Luca’s suit. “The
occurrence of minor amounts of water in the helmet was
normalized,” Chris told me. In the space station community, the
“perception was that drink bags leak, which led to an acceptance that
it was a likely explanation without digging deeper into it.”
Luca’s scare wasn’t the first time that NASA’s failure at
rethinking had proven disastrous. In 1986, the space shuttle
Challenger exploded after a catastrophically shallow analysis of the
risk that circular gaskets called O-rings could fail. Although this had
been identified as a launch constraint, NASA had a track record of
overriding it in prior missions without any problems occurring. On
an unusually cold launch day, the O-ring sealing the rocket booster
joints ruptured, allowing hot gas to burn through the fuel tank,
killing all seven Challenger astronauts.
In 2003, the space shuttle Columbia disintegrated under similar
circumstances. After takeoff, the team on the ground noticed that
some foam had fallen from the ship, but most of them assumed it
wasn’t a major issue since it had happened in past missions without
incident. They failed to rethink that assumption and instead started
discussing what repairs would be done to the ship to reduce the
turnaround time for the next mission. The foam loss was, in fact, a
critical issue: the damage it caused to the wing’s leading edge let hot
gas leak into the shuttle’s wing upon reentry into the atmosphere.
Once again, all seven astronauts lost their lives.
Rethinking is not just an individual skill. It’s a collective
capability, and it depends heavily on an organization’s culture. NASA
had long been a prime example of a performance culture: excellence
of execution was the paramount value. Although NASA accomplished
extraordinary things, they soon became victims of overconfidence
cycles. As people took pride in their standard operating procedures,
gained conviction in their routines, and saw their decisions validated
through their results, they missed opportunities for rethinking.
Rethinking is more likely to happen in a learning culture, where
growth is the core value and rethinking cycles are routine. In
learning cultures, the norm is for people to know what they don’t
know, doubt their existing practices, and stay curious about new
routines to try out. Evidence shows that in learning cultures,
organizations innovate more and make fewer mistakes. After
studying and advising change initiatives at NASA and the Gates
Foundation, I’ve learned that learning cultures thrive under a
particular combination of psychological safety and accountability.
I ERR, THEREFORE I LEARN
Years ago, an engineer turned management professor named Amy
Edmondson became interested in preventing medical errors. She
went into a hospital and surveyed its staff about the degree of
psychological safety they experienced in their teams—could they take
risks without the fear of being punished? Then she collected data on
the number of medical errors each team made, tracking serious
outcomes like potentially fatal doses of the wrong medication. She
was surprised to find that the more psychological safety a team felt,
the higher its error rates.
It appeared that psychological safety could breed complacency.
When trust runs deep in a team, people might not feel the need to
question their colleagues or double-check their own work.
But Edmondson soon recognized a major limitation of the data:
the errors were all self-reported. To get an unbiased measure of
mistakes, she sent a covert observer into the units. When she
analyzed those data, the results flipped: psychologically safe teams
reported more errors, but they actually made fewer errors. By freely
admitting their mistakes, they were then able to learn what had
caused them and eliminate them moving forward. In psychologically
unsafe teams, people hid their mishaps to avoid penalties, which
made it difficult for anyone to diagnose the root causes and prevent
future problems. They kept repeating the same mistakes.
Since then, research on psychological safety has flourished.
When I was involved in a study at Google to identify the factors that
distinguish teams with high performance and well-being, the most
important differentiator wasn’t who was on the team or even how
meaningful their work was. What mattered most was psychological
safety.
Over the past few years, psychological safety has become a
buzzword in many workplaces. Although leaders might understand
its significance, they often misunderstand exactly what it is and how
to create it. Edmondson is quick to point out that psychological
safety is not a matter of relaxing standards, making people
comfortable, being nice and agreeable, or giving unconditional
praise. It’s fostering a climate of respect, trust, and openness in
which people can raise concerns and suggestions without fear of
reprisal. It’s the foundation of a learning culture.
In performance cultures, the emphasis on results often
undermines psychological safety. When we see people get punished
for failures and mistakes, we become worried about proving our
competence and protecting our careers. We learn to engage in selflimiting behavior, biting our tongues rather than voicing questions
and concerns. Sometimes that’s due to power distance: we’re afraid
of challenging the big boss at the top. The pressure to conform to
authority is real, and those who dare to deviate run the risk of
backlash. In performance cultures, we also censor ourselves in the
presence of experts who seem to know all the answers—especially if
we lack confidence in our own expertise.
A lack of psychological safety was a persistent problem at NASA.
Before the Challenger launch, some engineers did raise red flags but
were silenced by managers; others were ignored and ended up
silencing themselves. After the Columbia launch, an engineer asked
for clearer photographs to inspect the damage to the wing, but
managers didn’t supply them. In a critical meeting to evaluate the
condition of the shuttle after takeoff, the engineer didn’t speak up.
About a month before that Columbia launch, Ellen Ochoa
became the deputy director of flight crew operations. In 1993, Ellen
had made history by becoming the first Latina in space. Now, the
first flight she supported in a management role had ended in tragedy.
After breaking the news to the space station crew and consoling the
family members of the fallen astronauts, she was determined to
figure out how she could personally help to prevent this kind of
disaster from ever happening again.
Ellen recognized that at NASA, the performance culture was
eroding psychological safety. “People pride themselves on their
engineering expertise and excellence,” she told me. “They fear their
expertise will be questioned in a way that’s embarrassing to them.
It’s that basic fear of looking like a fool, asking questions that people
just dismiss, or being told you don’t know what you’re talking about.”
To combat that problem and nudge the culture toward learning, she
started carrying a 3 × 5 note card in her pocket with questions to ask
about every launch and important operational decision. Her list
included:
What leads you to that assumption? Why do you think it is
correct? What might happen if it’s wrong?
What are the uncertainties in your analysis?
I understand the advantages of your recommendation. What
are the disadvantages?
A decade later, though, the same lessons about rethinking would
have to be relearned in the context of spacewalk suits. As flight
controllers first became aware of the droplets of water in Luca
Parmitano’s helmet, they made two faulty assumptions: the cause
was the drink bag, and the effect was inconsequential. It wasn’t until
the second spacewalk, when Luca was in actual danger, that they
started to question whether those assumptions were wrong.
When engineer Chris Hansen took over as the manager of the
extravehicular activity office, he inaugurated a norm of posing
questions like Ellen’s: “All anybody would’ve had to ask is, ‘How do
you know the drink bag leaked?’ The answer would’ve been, ‘Because
somebody told us.’ That response would’ve set off red flags. It
would’ve taken ten minutes to check, but nobody asked. It was the
same for Columbia. Boeing came in and said, ‘This foam, we think
we know what it did.’ If somebody had asked how they knew, nobody
could’ve answered that question.”
How do you know? It’s a question we need to ask more often,
both of ourselves and of others. The power lies in its frankness. It’s
nonjudgmental—a straightforward expression of doubt and curiosity
that doesn’t put people on the defensive. Ellen Ochoa wasn’t afraid to
ask that question, but she was an astronaut with a doctorate in
engineering, serving in a senior leadership role. For too many people
in too many workplaces, the question feels like a bridge too far.
Creating psychological safety is easier said than done, so I set out to
learn about how leaders can establish it.
SAFE AT HOME GATES
When I first arrived at the Gates Foundation, people were whispering
about the annual strategy reviews. It’s the time when program teams
across the foundation meet with the cochairs—Bill and Melinda
Gates—and the CEO to give progress reports on execution and collect
feedback. Although the foundation employs some of the world’s
leading experts in areas ranging from eradicating disease to
promoting educational equity, these experts are often intimidated by
Bill’s knowledge base, which seems impossibly broad and deep. What
if he spots a fatal flaw in my work? Will it be the end of my career
here?
A few years ago, leaders at the Gates Foundation reached out to
see if I could help them build psychological safety. They were worried
that the pressure to present airtight analyses was discouraging
people from taking risks. They often stuck to tried-and-true
strategies that would make incremental progress rather than daring
to undertake bold experiments that might make a bigger dent in
some of the world’s most vexing problems.
The existing evidence on creating psychological safety gave us
some starting points. I knew that changing the culture of an entire
organization is daunting, while changing the culture of a team is
more feasible. It starts with modeling the values we want to promote,
identifying and praising others who exemplify them, and building a
coalition of colleagues who are committed to making the change.
The standard advice for managers on building psychological
safety is to model openness and inclusiveness. Ask for feedback on
how you can improve, and people will feel safe to take risks. To test
whether that recommendation would work, I launched an
experiment with a doctoral student, Constantinos Coutifaris. In
multiple companies, we randomly assigned some managers to ask
their teams for constructive criticism. Over the following week, their
teams reported higher psychological safety, but as we anticipated, it
didn’t last. Some managers who asked for feedback didn’t like what
they heard and got defensive. Others found the feedback useless or
felt helpless to act on it, which discouraged them from continuing to
seek feedback and their teams from continuing to offer it.
Another group of managers took a different approach, one that
had less immediate impact in the first week but led to sustainable
gains in psychological safety a full year later. Instead of asking them
to seek feedback, we had randomly assigned those managers to share
their past experiences with receiving feedback and their future
development goals. We advised them to tell their teams about a time
when they benefited from constructive criticism and to identify the
areas that they were working to improve now.
By admitting some of their imperfections out loud, managers
demonstrated that they could take it—and made a public
commitment to remain open to feedback. They normalized
vulnerability, making their teams more comfortable opening up
about their own struggles. Their employees gave more useful
feedback because they knew where their managers were working to
grow. That motivated managers to create practices to keep the door
open: they started holding “ask me anything” coffee chats, opening
weekly one-on-one meetings by asking for constructive criticism, and
setting up monthly team sessions where everyone shared their
development goals and progress.
Creating psychological safety can’t be an isolated episode or a
task to check off on a to-do list. When discussing their weaknesses,
many of the managers in our experiment felt awkward and anxious
at first. Many of their team members were surprised by that
vulnerability and unsure of how to respond. Some were skeptical:
they thought their managers might be fishing for compliments or
cherry-picking comments that made them look good. It was only
over time—as managers repeatedly demonstrated humility and
curiosity—that the dynamic changed.
At the Gates Foundation, I wanted to go a step further. Instead of
just having managers open up with their own teams about how they
had previously been criticized, I wondered what would happen if
senior leaders shared their experiences across the entire
organization. It dawned on me that I had a memorable way to make
that happen.
A few years earlier, our MBA students at Wharton decided to
create a video for their annual comedy show. It was inspired by
“Mean Tweets,” the late-night segment on Jimmy Kimmel Live! in
which celebrities read cruel tweets about themselves out loud. Our
version was Mean Reviews, where faculty members read harsh
comments from student course evaluations. “This is possibly the
worst class I’ve ever taken in my life,” one professor read, looking
defeated before saying, “Fair enough.” Another read, “This professor
is a b*tch. But she’s a nice b*tch,” adding with chagrin: “That’s
sweet.” One of my own was “You remind me of a Muppet.” The
kicker belonged to a junior faculty member: “Prof acts all down with
pop culture, but secretly thinks Ariana Grande is a font in Microsoft
Word.”
I made it a habit to show that video in class every fall, and
afterward the floodgates would open. Students seemed to be more
comfortable sharing their criticisms and suggestions for
improvement after seeing that although I take my work seriously, I
don’t take myself too seriously.
I sent the video to Melinda Gates, asking if she thought
something similar might help with psychological safety in her
organization. She not only said yes; she challenged the entire
executive leadership team to participate and volunteered to be the
first to take the hot seat. Her team compiled criticisms from staff
surveys, printed them on note cards, and had her react in real time in
front of a camera. She read one employee’s complaint that she was
like Mary F***ing Poppins—the first time anyone could remember
hearing Melinda curse—and explained how she was working on
making her imperfections more visible.
To test the impact of her presentation, we randomly assigned
one group of employees to watch Melinda engage with the tough
comments, a second to watch a video of her talking about the culture
she wanted to create in more general terms, and a third to serve as a
pure control group. The first group came away with a stronger
learning orientation—they were inspired to recognize their
shortcomings and work to overcome them. Some of the power
distance evaporated—they were more likely to reach out to Melinda
and other senior leaders with both criticism and compliments. One
employee commented:
In that video Melinda did something that I’ve not yet
seen happen at the foundation: she broke through the
veneer. It happened for me when she said, “I go into so
many meetings where there are things I don’t know.” I had
to write that down because I was shocked and grateful at her
honesty. Later, when she laughed, like really belly-laughed,
and then answered the hard comments, the veneer came off
again and I saw that she was no less of Melinda Gates, but
actually, a whole lot more of Melinda Gates.
It takes confident humility to admit that we’re a work in
progress. It shows that we care more about improving ourselves than
proving ourselves.* If that mindset spreads far enough within an
organization, it can give people the freedom and courage to speak up.
But mindsets aren’t enough to transform a culture. Although
psychological safety erases the fear of challenging authority, it
doesn’t necessarily motivate us to question authority in the first
place. To build a learning culture, we also need to create a specific
kind of accountability—one that leads people to think again about the
best practices in their workplaces.
THE WORST THING ABOUT BEST PRACTICES
In performance cultures, people often become attached to best
practices. The risk is that once we’ve declared a routine the best, it
becomes frozen in time. We preach about its virtues and stop
questioning its vices, no longer curious about where it’s imperfect
and where it could improve. Organizational learning should be an
ongoing activity, but best practices imply it has reached an endpoint.
We might be better off looking for better practices.
At NASA, although teams routinely debriefed after both training
simulations and significant operational events, what sometimes
stood in the way of exploring better practices was a performance
culture that held people accountable for outcomes. Every time they
delayed a scheduled launch, they faced widespread public criticism
and threats to funding. Each time they celebrated a flight that made
it into orbit, they were encouraging their engineers to focus on the
fact that the launch resulted in a success rather than on the faulty
processes that could jeopardize future launches. That left NASA
rewarding luck and repeating problematic practices, failing to
rethink what qualified as an acceptable risk. It wasn’t for a lack of
ability. After all, these were rocket scientists. As Ellen Ochoa
observes, “When you are dealing with people’s lives hanging in the
balance, you rely on following the procedures you already have. This
can be the best approach in a time-critical situation, but it’s
problematic if it prevents a thorough assessment in the aftermath.”
Focusing on results might be good for short-term performance,
but it can be an obstacle to long-term learning. Sure enough, social
scientists find that when people are held accountable only for
whether the outcome was a success or failure, they are more likely to
continue with ill-fated courses of action. Exclusively praising and
rewarding results is dangerous because it breeds overconfidence in
poor strategies, incentivizing people to keep doing things the way
they’ve always done them. It isn’t until a high-stakes decision goes
horribly wrong that people pause to reexamine their practices.
We shouldn’t have to wait until a space shuttle explodes or an
astronaut nearly drowns to determine whether a decision was
successful. Along with outcome accountability, we can create process
accountability by evaluating how carefully different options are
considered as people make decisions. A bad decision process is based
on shallow thinking. A good process is grounded in deep thinking
and rethinking, enabling people to form and express independent
opinions. Research shows that when we have to explain the
procedures behind our decisions in real time, we think more
critically and process the possibilities more thoroughly.
Process accountability might sound like the opposite of
psychological safety, but they’re actually independent. Amy
Edmondson finds that when psychological safety exists without
accountability, people tend to stay within their comfort zone, and
when there’s accountability but not safety, people tend to stay silent
in an anxiety zone. When we combine the two, we create a learning
zone. People feel free to experiment—and to poke holes in one
another’s experiments in service of making them better. They
become a challenge network.
One of the most effective steps toward process accountability
that I’ve seen is at Amazon, where important decisions aren’t made
based on simple PowerPoint presentations. They’re informed by a
six-page memo that lays out a problem, the different approaches that
have been considered in the past, and how the proposed solutions
serve the customer. At the start of the meeting, to avoid groupthink,
everyone reads the memo silently. This isn’t practical in every
situation, but it’s paramount when choices are both consequential
and irreversible. Long before the results of the decision are known,
the quality of the process can be evaluated based on the rigor and
creativity of the author’s thinking in the memo and in the
thoroughness of the discussion that ensues in the meeting.
In learning cultures, people don’t stop keeping score. They
expand the scorecard to consider processes as well as outcomes:
Even if the outcome of a decision is positive, it doesn’t
necessarily qualify as a success. If the process was shallow, you were
lucky. If the decision process was deep, you can count it as an
improvement: you’ve discovered a better practice. If the outcome is
negative, it’s a failure only if the decision process was shallow. If the
result was negative but you evaluated the decision thoroughly, you’ve
run a smart experiment.
The ideal time to run those experiments is when decisions are
relatively inconsequential or reversible. In too many organizations,
leaders look for guarantees that the results will be favorable before
testing or investing in something new. It’s the equivalent of telling
Gutenberg you’d only bankroll his printing press once he had a long
line of satisfied customers—or announcing to a group of HIV
researchers that you’d only fund their clinical trials after their
treatments worked.
Requiring proof is an enemy of progress. This is why companies
like Amazon use a principle of disagree and commit. As Jeff Bezos
explained it in an annual shareholder letter, instead of demanding
convincing results, experiments start with asking people to make
bets. “Look, I know we disagree on this but will you gamble with me
on it?” The goal in a learning culture is to welcome these kinds of
experiments, to make rethinking so familiar that it becomes routine.
Process accountability isn’t just a matter of rewards and
punishments. It’s also about who has decision authority. In a study
of California banks, executives often kept approving additional loans
to customers who’d already defaulted on a previous one. Since the
bankers had signed off on the first loan, they were motivated to
justify their initial decision. Interestingly, banks were more likely to
identify and write off problem loans when they had high rates of
executive turnover. If you’re not the person who greenlit the initial
loan, you have every incentive to rethink the previous assessment of
that customer. If they’ve defaulted on the past nineteen loans, it’s
probably time to adjust. Rethinking is more likely when we separate
the initial decision makers from the later decision evaluators.
© Hayley Lewis, Sketchnote summary of A Spectrum of Reasons for Failure. Illustration
drawn May 2020. London, United Kingdom. Copyright © 2020 by HALO Psychology
Limited.
For years, NASA had failed to create that separation. Ellen
Ochoa recalls that traditionally “the same managers who were
responsible for cost and schedule were the ones who also had the
authority to waive technical requirements. It’s easy to talk yourself
into something on a launch day.”
The Columbia disaster reinforced the need for NASA to develop
a stronger learning culture. On the next space shuttle flight, a
problem surfaced with the sensors in an external engine tank. It
reoccurred several more times over the next year and a half, but it
didn’t create any observable problems. In 2006, on the day of a
countdown in Houston, the whole mission management team held a
vote. There was overwhelming consensus that the launch should go
forward. Only one outlier had voted no: Ellen Ochoa.
In the old performance culture, Ellen might’ve been afraid to
vote against the launch. In the emerging learning culture, “it’s not
just that we’re encouraged to speak up. It’s our responsibility to
speak up,” she explains. “Inclusion at NASA is not only a way to
increase innovation and engage employees; it directly affects safety
since people need to feel valued and respected in order to be
comfortable speaking up.” In the past, the onus would’ve been on her
to prove it was not safe to launch. Now the onus was on the team to
prove it was safe to launch. That meant approaching their expertise
with more humility, their decision with more doubt, and their
analysis with more curiosity about the causes and potential
consequences of the problem.
After the vote, Ellen received a call from the NASA administrator
in Florida, who expressed surprising interest in rethinking the
majority opinion in the room. “I’d like to understand your thinking,”
he told her. They went on to delay the launch. “Some people weren’t
happy we didn’t launch that day,” Ellen reflects. “But people did not
come up to me and berate me in any way or make me feel bad. They
didn’t take it out on me personally.” The following day all the sensors
worked properly, but NASA ended up delaying three more launches
over the next few months due to intermittent sensor malfunctions. At
that point, the manager of the shuttle program called for the team to
stand down until they identified the root cause. Eventually they
figured out that the sensors were working fine; it was the cryogenic
environment that was causing a faulty connection between the
sensors and computers.
Ellen became the deputy director and then the director of the
Johnson Space Center, and NASA went on to execute nineteen
consecutive successful space shuttle missions before retiring the
program. In 2018, when Ellen retired from NASA, a senior leader
approached her to tell her how her vote to delay the launch in 2006
had affected him. “I never said anything to you twelve years ago,” he
said, but “it made me rethink how I approached launch days and
whether I’m doing the right thing.”
We can’t run experiments in the past; we can only imagine the
counterfactual in the present. We can wonder whether the lives of
fourteen astronauts would have been saved if NASA had gone back to
rethink the risks of O-ring failures and foam loss before it was too
late. We can wonder why those events didn’t make them as careful in
reevaluating problems with spacesuits as they had become with
space shuttles. In cultures of learning, we’re not weighed down with
as many of these questions—which means we can live with fewer
regrets.
PART IV
Conclusion
CHAPTER 11
Escaping Tunnel Vision
Reconsidering Our Best-Laid Career and Life Plans
A malaise set in within a couple hours of my arriving. I
thought getting a job might help. It turns out I have a lot of
relatives in Hell, and, using connections, I became the
assistant to a demon who pulls people’s teeth out. It wasn’t
actually a job, more of an internship. But I was eager. And at
first it was kind of interesting. After a while, though, you start
asking yourself: Is this what I came to Hell for, to hand
different kinds of pliers to a demon?
—
W
hat do you want to be when you grow up? As a kid, that
was my least favorite question. I dreaded conversations
with adults because they always asked it—and no matter
how I replied, they never liked my answer. When I said I wanted to
be a superhero, they laughed. My next goal was to make the NBA, but
despite countless hours of shooting hoops on my driveway, I was cut
from middle school basketball tryouts three years in a row. I was
clearly aiming too high.
In high school, I became obsessed with springboard diving and
decided I wanted to become a diving coach. Adults scoffed at that
plan: they told me I was aiming too low. In my first semester of
college, I decided to major in psychology, but that didn’t open any
doors—it just gave me a few to close. I knew I didn’t want to be a
therapist (not patient enough) or a psychiatrist (too squeamish for
med school). I was still aimless, and I envied people who had a clear
career plan.
From the time he was in kindergarten, my cousin Ryan knew
exactly what he wanted to be when he grew up. Becoming a doctor
wasn’t just the American dream—it was the family dream. Our greatgrandparents emigrated from Russia and barely scraped by. Our
grandmother was a secretary, and our grandfather worked in a
factory, but it wasn’t enough to support five children, so he worked a
second job delivering milk. Before his kids were teenagers, he had
taught them to drive the milk truck so they could finish their 4:00
a.m. delivery cycle before the school day and workday started. When
none of their children went on to med school (or milk delivery), my
grandparents hoped our generation would bring the prestige of a Dr.
Grant to the family.
The first seven grandchildren didn’t become doctors. I was the
eighth, and I worked multiple jobs to pay for college and to keep my
options open. They were proud when I ended up getting my
doctorate in psychology, but they still hoped for a real doctor. For
the ninth grandchild, Ryan, who arrived four years after me, an M.D.
was practically preordained.
Ryan checked all the right boxes: along with being precocious, he
had a strong work ethic. He set his sights on becoming a
neurosurgeon. He was passionate about the potential to help people
and ready to persist in the face of whatever obstacles would come
into his path.
When Ryan was looking at colleges, he came to visit me. As we
started talking about majors, he expressed a flicker of doubt about
the premed track and asked if he should study economics instead.
There’s a term in psychology that captures Ryan’s personality:
blirtatiousness. Yep, that’s an actual research concept, derived from
the combination of blurting and flirting. When “blirters” meet
people, their responses tend to be fast and effusive. They typically
score high in extraversion and impulsiveness—and low in shyness
and neuroticism. Ryan could push himself to study for long hours,
but it drained him. Drawn to something more active and social, he
toyed with the idea of squeezing in an economics major along with
premed, but abandoned that idea when he got to college. Gotta stay
on track.
Ryan sailed through the premed curriculum and became a
teaching assistant for undergrads while he was still an undergrad
himself. When he showed up at exam review sessions and saw how
stressed the students were, he refused to start covering the material
until they stood up and danced. When he was accepted to an Ivy
League medical school, he asked me if he should do a joint M.D.–
M.B.A. program. He hadn’t lost his interest in business, but he was
afraid to divide his attention. Gotta stay on track.
In his last year of med school, Ryan dutifully applied to
neurosurgery residencies. It takes a focused brain to slice into the
brain of another human. He wasn’t sure if he was cut out for it—or if
the career would leave any space for him to have a life. He wondered
if he should start a health-care company instead, but when he was
admitted to Yale, he opted for the residency. Gotta stay on track.
Partway through his residency, the grueling hours and the
intense focus began to take their toll, and Ryan burned out. He felt
that if he died that very day, no one in the system would really care
or even notice. He regularly suffered from the heartache of losing
patients and the headache of dealing with abusive attending
surgeons, and there was no end in sight. Although it was his
childhood dream and our grandparents’ dream, his work left little
time for anything else. The sheer exhaustion left him questioning
whether he should quit.
Ryan decided that he couldn’t give up. He had gone too far to
change course, so he finished the seven-year neurosurgery residency.
When he submitted the paperwork for his credentials, the hospital
denied him because he had placed the dates on his résumé on the
right instead of the left. He was so fed up with the system that, out of
principle, he refused to move them. After winning that battle with
bureaucracy, he added another feather to his cap, doing an eighth
year of a fellowship in complex, minimally invasive spinal surgery.
Today Ryan is a neurosurgeon at a major medical center. In his
midthirties, he’s still in debt from student loans more than a decade
after graduating from med school. Even though he enjoys helping
people and caring for patients, the long hours and red tape undercut
his enthusiasm. He tells me that if he could do it over, he would have
gone a different route. I’ve often wondered what it would have taken
to convince him to rethink his chosen line of work—and what he
truly wanted out of a career.
We all have notions of who we want to be and how we hope to
lead our lives. They’re not limited to careers; from an early age, we
develop ideas about where we’ll live, which school we’ll attend, what
kind of person we’ll marry, and how many kids we’ll have. These
images can inspire us to set bolder goals and guide us toward a path
to achieve them. The danger of these plans is that they can give us
tunnel vision, blinding us to alternative possibilities. We don’t know
how time and circumstances will change what we want and even who
we want to be, and locking our life GPS onto a single target can give
us the right directions to the wrong destination.
GOING INTO FORECLOSURE
When we dedicate ourselves to a plan and it isn’t going as we hoped,
our first instinct isn’t usually to rethink it. Instead, we tend to double
down and sink more resources in the plan. This pattern is called
escalation of commitment. Evidence shows that entrepreneurs
persist with failing strategies when they should pivot, NBA general
managers and coaches keep investing in new contracts and more
playing time for draft busts, and politicians continue sending soldiers
to wars that didn’t need to be fought in the first place. Sunk costs are
a factor, but the most important causes appear to be psychological
rather than economic. Escalation of commitment happens because
we’re rationalizing creatures, constantly searching for selfjustifications for our prior beliefs as a way to soothe our egos, shield
our images, and validate our past decisions.
Escalation of commitment is a major factor in preventable
failures. Ironically, it can be fueled by one of the most celebrated
engines of success: grit. Grit is the combination of passion and
perseverance, and research shows that it can play an important role
in motivating us to accomplish long-term goals. When it comes to
rethinking, though, grit may have a dark side. Experiments show that
gritty people are more likely to overplay their hands in roulette and
more willing to stay the course in tasks at which they’re failing and
success is impossible. Researchers have even suggested that gritty
mountaineers are more likely to die on expeditions, because they’re
determined to do whatever it takes to reach the summit. There’s a
fine line between heroic persistence and foolish stubbornness.
Sometimes the best kind of grit is gritting our teeth and turning
around.
Ryan escalated his commitment to medical training for sixteen
years. If he had been less tenacious, he might have changed tracks
sooner. Early on, he had fallen victim to what psychologists call
identity foreclosure—when we settle prematurely on a sense of self
without enough due diligence, and close our minds to alternative
selves.
In career choices, identity foreclosure often begins when adults
ask kids: what do you want to be when you grow up? Pondering that
question can foster a fixed mindset about work and self. “I think it’s
one of the most useless questions an adult can ask a child,” Michelle
Obama writes. “What do you want to be when you grow up? As if
growing up is finite. As if at some point you become something and
that’s the end.”*
Some kids dream too small. They foreclose on following in family
footsteps and never really consider alternatives. You probably know
some people who faced the opposite problem. They dreamed too big,
becoming attached to a lofty vision that wasn’t realistic. Sometimes
we lack the talent to pursue our callings professionally, leaving them
unanswered; other times there’s little hope that our passions can pay
the bills. “You can be anything you wanna be?!” the comedian Chris
Rock quipped. “Tell the kids the truth. . . . You can be anything
you’re good at . . . as long as they’re hiring.”
Even if kids get excited about a career path that does prove
realistic, what they thought was their dream job can turn out to be a
nightmare. Kids might be better off learning about careers as actions
to take rather than as identities to claim. When they see work as
what they do rather than who they are, they become more open to
exploring different possibilities.
Although children are often fascinated by science from a young
age, over the course of elementary school, they tend to lose interest
and confidence in their potential to be scientists. Recent studies
show that it’s possible to maintain their enthusiasm by introducing
them to science differently. When second and third graders learned
about “doing science” rather than “being scientists,” they were more
excited about pursuing science. Becoming a scientist might seem out
of reach, but the act of experimenting is something we can all try out.
Even prekindergarten students express more interest in science
when it’s presented as something we do rather than someone we are.
Recently at dinner, our kids decided to go around the table to ask
what everyone wanted to be when they grew up. I told them they
didn’t need to choose one career; the average person ends up holding
a dozen different jobs. They didn’t have to be one thing; they could
do many things. They started brainstorming about all the things they
love to do. Their lists ended up including designing Lego sets,
studying space, creative writing, architecture, interior design,
teaching gymnastics, photography, coaching soccer, and being a
fitness YouTuber.
Choosing a career isn’t like finding a soul mate. It’s possible that
your ideal job hasn’t even been invented yet. Old industries are
changing, and new industries are emerging faster than ever before: it
wasn’t that long ago that Google, Uber, and Instagram didn’t exist.
Your future self doesn’t exist right now, either, and your interests
might change over time.
TIME FOR A CHECKUP
We foreclose on all kinds of life plans. Once you’ve committed to one,
it becomes part of your identity, making it difficult to de-escalate.
Declaring an English major because you love to read, only to discover
that you don’t enjoy the process of writing. Deciding to start college
during a pandemic, only to conclude later that you should have
considered a gap year. Gotta stay on track. Ending a romantic
relationship because you don’t want kids, only to realize years down
the road that you might after all.
Identity foreclosure can stop us from evolving. In a study of
amateur musicians, those who had settled on music as a professional
calling were more likely to ignore career advice from a trusted
adviser over the course of the following seven years. They listened to
their hearts and tuned out their mentors. In some ways, identity
foreclosure is the opposite of an identity crisis: instead of accepting
uncertainty about who we want to become, we develop compensatory
conviction and plunge head over heels into a career path. I’ve noticed
that the students who are the most certain about their career plans at
twenty are often the ones with the deepest regrets by thirty. They
haven’t done enough rethinking along the way.*
Sometimes it’s because they’re thinking too much like
politicians, eager to earn the approval of parents and peers. They
become seduced by status, failing to see that no matter how much an
accomplishment or affiliation impresses someone else, it’s still a
poor choice if it depresses them. In other cases it’s because they’re
stuck in preacher mode, and they’ve come to see a job as a sacred
cause. And occasionally they pick careers in prosecutor mode, where
they charge classmates with selling their souls to capitalism and hurl
themselves into nonprofits in the hopes of saving the world.
Sadly, they often know too little about the job—and too little
about their evolving selves—to make a lifelong commitment. They
get trapped in an overconfidence cycle, taking pride in pursuing a
career identity and surrounding themselves with people who validate
their conviction. By the time they discover it was the wrong fit, they
feel it’s too late to think again. The stakes seem too high to walk
away; the sacrifices of salary, status, skill, and time seem too great.
For the record, I think it’s better to lose the past two years of
progress than to waste the next twenty. In hindsight, identity
foreclosure is a Band-Aid: it covers up an identity crisis, but fails to
cure it.
My advice to students is to take a cue from health-care
professions. Just as they make appointments with the doctor and the
dentist even when nothing is wrong, they should schedule checkups
on their careers. I encourage them to put a reminder in their
calendars to ask some key questions twice a year. When did you form
the aspirations you’re currently pursuing, and how have you changed
since then? Have you reached a learning plateau in your role or your
workplace, and is it time to consider a pivot? Answering these career
checkup questions is a way to periodically activate rethinking cycles.
It helps students maintain humility about their ability to predict the
future, contemplate doubts about their plans, and stay curious
enough to discover new possibilities or reconsider previously
discarded ones.
I had one student, Marissa Shandell, who scored a coveted job at
a prestigious consulting firm and planned on climbing up the ladder.
She kept getting promoted early but found herself working around
the clock. Instead of continuing to just grit and bear it, she and her
husband had a career checkup conversation every six months, talking
not just about the growth trajectory of their companies but also
about the growth trajectory of their jobs. After being promoted to
associate partner well ahead of schedule, Marissa realized she had
reached a learning plateau (and a lifestyle plateau) and decided to
pursue a doctorate in management.*
Deciding to leave a current career path is often easier than
identifying a new one. My favorite framework for navigating that
challenge comes from a management professor, Herminia Ibarra.
She finds that as people consider career choices and transitions, it
helps to think like scientists. A first step is to entertain possible
selves: identify some people you admire within or outside your field,
and observe what they actually do at work day by day. A second step
is to develop hypotheses about how these paths might align with
your own interests, skills, and values. A third step is to test out the
different identities by running experiments: do informational
interviews, job shadowing, and sample projects to get a taste of the
work. The goal is not to confirm a particular plan but to expand your
repertoire of possible selves—which keeps you open to rethinking.
Checkups aren’t limited to careers—they’re relevant to the plans
we make in every domain of our lives. A few years ago, a former
student called for romantic advice. Caveat: I’m not that kind of
psychologist. He’d been dating a woman for just over a year, and
although it was the most fulfilling relationship he’d ever had, he was
still questioning whether it was the right match. He had always
imagined himself marrying a woman who was ambitious in her
career or passionate about improving the world, and his girlfriend
seemed less driven and more relaxed in her approach to life.
It was an ideal time for a checkup. I asked him how old he was
when he formed that vision of a partner and how much he’d changed
since then. He said he’d held it since he was a teenager and had never
paused to rethink it. As we talked, he started to realize that if he and
his girlfriend were happy together, ambition and passion might not
be as important to him in a partner as they had been in the past. He
came to understand that he was inspired by women who were highly
motivated to succeed and serve because that was who he wanted to
be.
Two and a half years later, he reached out with an update. He
had decided to let go of his preconceived image of who his partner
should be:
I decided to open up and talk to her about how she’s
different from the person I’d imagined being with.
Surprisingly, she told me the same thing! I wasn’t who she
imagined she’d end up with either—she expected to end up
with a guy who was more of a creative, someone who was
more gregarious. We accepted it and moved on. I’m thrilled
to have left my old ideas behind to make space for the full
her and everything our relationship could bring.
Just before the pandemic, he proposed to her, and they’re now
engaged.
A successful relationship requires regular rethinking. Sometimes
being considerate means reconsidering something as simple as our
habits. Learning not to be fashionably late to everything. Retiring
that wardrobe of ratty conference T-shirts. Rolling over to snore in
the other direction. At other times being supportive means opening
our minds to bigger life changes—moving to a different country, a
different community, or a different job to support our partner’s
priorities. In my student’s case, it meant rethinking who his fiancée
would be, but also staying open to who she might become. She
eventually switched jobs and became passionate about both her work
and a personal cause of fighting educational inequity. When we’re
willing to update our ideas of who our partners are, it can give them
freedom to evolve and our relationships room to grow.
Whether we do checkups with our partners, our parents, or our
mentors, it’s worth pausing once or twice a year to reflect on how our
aspirations have changed. As we identify past images of our lives that
are no longer relevant to our future, we can start to rethink our
plans. That can set us up for happiness—as long as we’re not too
fixated on finding it.
WHEN CHASING HAPPINESS CHASES IT AWAY
When we think about how to plan our lives, there are few things that
take priority over happiness. The kingdom of Bhutan has a Gross
National Happiness index. In the United States, the pursuit of
happiness is so prized that it’s one of the three unalienable rights in
our Declaration of Independence. If we’re not careful, though, the
pursuit of happiness can become a recipe for misery.
Psychologists find that the more people value happiness, the less
happy they often become with their lives. It’s true for people who
naturally care about happiness and for people who are randomly
assigned to reflect on why happiness matters. There’s even evidence
that placing a great deal of importance on happiness is a risk factor
for depression. Why?
One possibility is that when we’re searching for happiness, we
get too busy evaluating life to actually experience it. Instead of
savoring our moments of joy, we ruminate about why our lives aren’t
more joyful. A second likely culprit is that we spend too much time
striving for peak happiness, overlooking the fact that happiness
depends more on the frequency of positive emotions than their
intensity. A third potential factor is that when we hunt for happiness,
we overemphasize pleasure at the expense of purpose. This theory is
consistent with data suggesting that meaning is healthier than
happiness, and that people who look for purpose in their work are
more successful in pursuing their passions—and less likely to quit
their jobs—than those who look for joy. While enjoyment waxes and
wanes, meaning tends to last. A fourth explanation is that Western
conceptions of happiness as an individual state leave us feeling
lonely. In more collectivistic Eastern cultures, that pattern is
reversed: pursuing happiness predicts higher well-being, because
people prioritize social engagement over independent activities.
Last fall a student stopped by my office hours for some advice.
She explained that when she chose Wharton, she had focused too
much on getting into the best school and too little on finding the best
fit. She wished she had picked a college with a more carefree culture
and a stronger sense of community. Now that she was clear on her
values, she was considering a transfer to a school that would make
her happier.
A few weeks later she told me that a moment in class had helped
her rethink her plan. It wasn’t the research on happiness that we
discussed, the values survey she took, or the decision-making activity
we did. It was a comedy sketch I showed from Saturday Night Live.
The scene stars Adam Sandler as a tour guide. In a mock
commercial advertising his company’s Italian tours, he mentions that
customer reviews sometimes express disappointment. He takes the
opportunity to remind customers about what a vacation can and
can’t do for them:
There’s a lot a vacation can do: help you unwind, see
some different-looking squirrels, but it cannot fix deeper
issues, like how you behave in group settings.
We can take you on a hike. We cannot turn you into
someone who likes hiking.
Remember, you’re still gonna be you on vacation. If you
are sad where you are, and then you get on a plane to Italy,
the you in Italy will be the same sad you from before, just in
a new place.
© Saturday Night Live/NBC
When we pursue happiness, we often start by changing our
surroundings. We expect to find bliss in a warmer climate or a
friendlier dorm, but any joy that those choices bring about is
typically temporary. In a series of studies, students who changed
their environments by adjusting their living arrangements or course
schedules quickly returned to their baseline levels of happiness. As
Ernest Hemingway wrote, “You can’t get away from yourself by
moving from one place to another.” Meanwhile, students who
changed their actions by joining a new club, adjusting their study
habits, or starting a new project experienced lasting gains in
happiness. Our happiness often depends more on what we do than
where we are. It’s our actions—not our surroundings—that bring us
meaning and belonging.
My student decided not to transfer. Instead of rethinking where
she went to school, she would rethink how she spent her time. She
might not be able to change the culture of an entire institution, but
she could create a new subculture. She started doing weekly coffee
chats with classmates and invited the ones who shared her interests
and values over for weekly tea. A few months later, she reported that
she had formed several close friendships and was thrilled with her
decision to stay. The impact didn’t stop there: her tea gatherings
became a tradition for welcoming students who felt out of place.
Instead of transferring to a new community, they built their own
microcommunity. They weren’t focusing on happiness—they were
looking for contribution and connection.
LIFE, LIBERTY, AND THE PURSUIT OF MEANING
To be clear, I wouldn’t encourage anyone to stay in a role,
relationship, or place they hated unless they had no other
alternatives. Still, when it comes to careers, instead of searching for
the job where we’ll be happiest, we might be better off pursuing the
job where we expect to learn and contribute the most.
Psychologists find that passions are often developed, not
discovered. In a study of entrepreneurs, the more effort they put into
their startups, the more their enthusiasm about their businesses
climbed each week. Their passion grew as they gained momentum
and mastery. Interest doesn’t always lead to effort and skill;
sometimes it follows them. By investing in learning and problem
solving, we can develop our passions—and build the skills necessary
to do the work and lead the lives we find worthwhile.
As we get older, we become more focused on searching for
meaning—and we’re most likely to find it in actions that benefit
others. My favorite test of meaningful work is to ask: if this job didn’t
exist, how much worse off would people be? It’s near midlife that this
question often begins to loom large. At around this time, in both
work and life, we feel we have more to give (and less to lose), and
we’re especially keen to share our knowledge and skills with the next
generation.
When my students talk about the evolution of self-esteem in
their careers, the progression often goes something like this:
Phase 1: I’m not important
Phase 2: I’m important
Phase 3: I want to contribute to something important
I’ve noticed that the sooner they get to phase 3, the more impact
they have and the more happiness they experience. It’s left me
thinking about happiness less as a goal and more as a by-product of
mastery and meaning. “Those only are happy,” philosopher John
Stuart Mill wrote, “who have their minds fixed on some object other
than their own happiness; on the happiness of others, on the
improvement of mankind, even on some art or pursuit, followed not
as a means, but as itself an ideal end. Aiming thus at something else,
they find happiness by the way.”
Careers, relationships, and communities are examples of what
scientists call open systems—they’re constantly in flux because
they’re not closed off from the environments around them. We know
that open systems are governed by at least two key principles: there
are always multiple paths to the same end (equifinality), and the
same starting point can be a path to many different ends
(multifinality). We should be careful to avoid getting too attached to
a particular route or even a particular destination. There isn’t one
definition of success or one track to happiness.
My cousin Ryan finally wound up rethinking his career arc. Five
years into his neurosurgery residency, he did his own version of a
career checkup and decided to scratch his entrepreneurial itch. He
cofounded a fast-growing, venture-backed startup called Nomad
Health, which creates a marketplace to match clinicians with medical
facilities. He also advised several medical device startups, filed
medical device patents, and is now working on multiple startups to
improve health care. Looking back, he still regrets that he foreclosed
so early on an identity as a neurosurgeon and escalated his
commitment to that career.
At work and in life, the best we can do is plan for what we want
to learn and contribute over the next year or two, and stay open to
what might come next. To adapt an analogy from E. L. Doctorow,
writing out a plan for your life “is like driving at night in the fog. You
can only see as far as your headlights, but you can make the whole
trip that way.”
’
our entire paths to rethink some of our
plans. Some people are perfectly content with their fields of work but
dissatisfied with their current roles. Others may be too risk averse to
make a geographic move for a job or a partner. And many don’t have
the luxury of making a pivot: being economically dependent on a job
or emotionally attached to an extended family can limit the options
available. Whether or not we have the opportunity or appetite for
major changes in our lives, it’s still possible to make smaller
adjustments that breathe new meaning into our days.
My colleagues Amy Wrzesniewski and Jane Dutton find that in
every line of work, there are people who become active architects of
their own jobs. They rethink their roles through job crafting—
changing their daily actions to better fit their values, interests, and
skills. One of the places Amy and Jane studied job crafting was in the
University of Michigan health-care system.
If you visited a certain floor of the hospital, it wouldn’t be long
before cancer patients told you how grateful they were for Candice
Walker. Her mission was not only to protect their fragile immune
systems—it was also to care for their fragile emotions. She called the
chemotherapy center the House of Hope.
Candice was often the first one to console families when their
loved ones went through treatment; she showed up with bagels and
coffee. She would make patients laugh by telling stories about her
cats drinking her milk or showing them that she had accidentally put
on one brown sock and one blue sock. One day she saw a patient on
the floor of an elevator writhing in pain, and the staff members
nearby weren’t sure what to do. Candice immediately took charge,
rushed the woman into a wheelchair, and took her up in the elevator
for urgent treatment. The patient later called her “my savior.”
Candice Walker wasn’t a doctor or a nurse. She wasn’t a social
worker, either. She was a custodian. Her official job was to keep the
cancer center clean.
Candice and her fellow custodians were all hired to do the same
job, but some of them ended up rethinking their roles. One cleaner
on a long-term intensive care unit took it upon herself to regularly
rearrange the paintings on the walls, hoping that a change of scenery
might spark some awareness among patients in comas. When asked
about it, she said, “No, it’s not part of my job, but it’s part of me.”
Our identities are open systems, and so are our lives. We don’t
have to stay tethered to old images of where we want to go or who we
want to be. The simplest way to start rethinking our options is to
question what we do daily.
It takes humility to reconsider our past commitments, doubt to
question our present decisions, and curiosity to reimagine our future
plans. What we discover along the way can free us from the shackles
of our familiar surroundings and our former selves. Rethinking
liberates us to do more than update our knowledge and opinions—
it’s a tool for leading a more fulfilling life.
Epilogue
“What I believe” is a process rather than a finality.
—
W
hen reading fiction, my favorite part has always been the
conclusion. As long as I can remember, whether I was
devouring sci-fi like Ender’s Game or mystery like The
Westing Game, the twist at the end wasn’t just the highlight of the
story. It transformed the story, making me rethink everything I’d
read before.
In writing about ideas, though, I’ve never liked conclusions.
Can’t the final chapter just serve as the end? It’s a book, not a book
report. If I had something else worth saying, I would’ve already
said it.*
What bothers me most about a conclusion is the finality. If a
topic is important enough to deserve an entire book, it shouldn’t end.
It should be open-ended.
That’s an inherent challenge for Think Again. I don’t want the
conclusion to bring closure. I want my thinking to keep evolving. To
symbolize that openness, I decided to make the epilogue a blank
page. Literally.
My challenge network unanimously rejected that concept. Two of
my most insightful students convinced me that although it might
represent an endpoint for me as a writer, it’s a starting point for you
as a reader—a springboard to new thoughts and a bridge to new
conversations. Then they proposed a way to honor the spirit of the
book: I could take a cue from Ron Berger’s classroom and show some
of my rethinking of the conclusion from one draft to the next.
I loved the idea.* For a book about rethinking, it seemed
delightfully meta. Like the Seinfeld coffee table book about coffee
tables—or the time when Ryan Gosling wore a shirt with a photo of
Macaulay Culkin, and Macaulay Culkin one-upped him by wearing a
shirt with a picture of Ryan Gosling wearing that shirt.*
The conclusion seemed like the perfect place to show a few key
moments of rethinking, but I still didn’t know what to cover. I went
back to my challenge network, and they suggested one more way to
synthesize key themes and provide an update on what I’m rethinking
right now.
The first thing that came to mind was a moment in the factchecking process, when I learned that scientists have revised their
thinking about the purported plumage of the tyrannosaurus family.
If you were picturing a feathered T. rex in chapter 1, so was I, but the
current consensus is that a typical T. rex was covered mostly in
scales. If you’re devastated by that update, please flip to the index
and look up joy of being wrong, the. Actually, I have some good
news: there’s another tyrannosaur, the yutyrannus, that scientists
believe was covered in vibrant feathers to stay cool.*
Lately, I’ve been thinking again about how rethinking happens.
For thousands of years, much of the rethinking that people did
unfolded invisibly in groups over time. Before the printing press, a
great deal of knowledge was transmitted orally. Human history was
one long game of telephone, where each sender would remember and
convey information differently, and each receiver would have no way
of knowing how the story had changed. By the time an idea traveled
across a land, it could be completely reimagined without anyone’s
being aware of it. As more information began to be recorded in books
and then newspapers, we could begin to track the different ways in
which knowledge and beliefs evolved. Today, although we can see
every revision made in Wikipedia, the individuals making the
changes often wind up in edit wars, refusing to concede that others
were right or that they were wrong. Codifying knowledge might help
us track it, but it doesn’t necessarily lead us to open our minds.
Many great thinkers have argued that rethinking is a task for
each generation, not each person—even in science. As the eminent
physicist Max Planck put it, “A new scientific truth does not triumph
by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but
rather because its opponents eventually die.” From this perspective,
generations are replaced faster than people change their views.
I no longer believe that has to be the case. We all have the
capacity to think again—we just don’t use it often enough, because
we don’t think like scientists often enough.
The scientific method can be traced back several millennia, at
least as far back as Aristotle and the ancient Greeks. I was surprised
to learn, then, that the word scientist is relatively new: it wasn’t
coined until 1833. For centuries, there was no general term for
people whose profession was to discover knowledge through
developing hypotheses, designing experiments, and collecting data. I
hope we don’t wait that long to recognize that this way of thinking
applies to every line of work—and any walk of life.
Even as this book goes to press, I’m still rethinking. In making
the case for thinking like a scientist, something has been nagging at
me. I wonder if I’ve devoted too little attention to the situations in
which it’s productive to preach, prosecute, and politick. When it
comes to rethinking our own views, the weight of the evidence favors
the scientist mode as giving us the best odds.* But the ideal mode is
less clear cut when it comes to opening other people’s minds. I tried
to capture the nuances in the value of each approach, exploring how
preaching can be effective in debates with people who are receptive
to our viewpoint or aren’t invested in the issue; prosecuting can get
through to audiences who aren’t determined to be in control; and
simplicity can persuade our own political tribe. But even after
reviewing these data points, I still wasn’t sure whether I’d done
enough to qualify my argument.
Then the coronavirus pandemic happened, and I became curious
about how leaders communicate during crisis. How do they give
people a sense of security in the present and hope for the future?
Preaching the virtues of their plans and prosecuting alternative
proposals could reduce uncertainty. Making a political case might
rally the base around shared goals.
For me, the most instructive example came from the governor of
New York. In an early speech in the spring, as his state and the
nation faced an unprecedented crisis, he announced, “It is common
sense to take a method and try it: If it fails, admit it frankly and try
another. But above all, try something.”
The New York Times quickly eviscerated the governor’s speech,
noting that “something unspecified is no better than nothing.”
Whereas other leaders were “precise, concrete, positive,” the
governor was “indefinite, abstract, irresolute.” It wasn’t just the
media that trashed the speech—one of the governor’s own advisers
apparently described it as an act of political stupidity.
It’s easy to see the appeal of a confident leader who offers a clear
vision, a strong plan, and a definitive forecast for the future. But in
times of crisis as well as times of prosperity, what we need more is a
leader who accepts uncertainty, acknowledges mistakes, learns from
others, and rethinks plans. That’s what this particular governor was
offering, and the early critics were wrong about how his proposed
approach would unfold.
This didn’t happen during the coronavirus pandemic, and the
governor wasn’t Andrew Cuomo. It occurred the last time
unemployment in America was so high: during the Great Depression.
It was 1932, and the governor of New York was Franklin Delano
Roosevelt. He delivered his “try something” message as the country
was reeling from the Great Depression, in a commencement speech
at a small university in Georgia. In the most memorable line from the
speech, FDR argued that “the country demands bold, persistent
experimentation.” That principle became a touchstone of his
leadership. Although economists are still debating which of the
resulting reforms lifted the country out of a historic depression,
FDR’s trial-and-error method of formulating policy was popular
enough that Americans elected him president four times.
In his commencement speech, FDR wasn’t preaching,
prosecuting, or appealing to politics. He spoke with the same kind of
confident humility that you’d expect from a scientist. There’s a lot we
don’t know about how to communicate confident humility. When
people lack knowledge about a complex topic—like stopping a
pandemic or reinvigorating an economy—they might be comfortable
with leaders admitting what they don’t know today and doubting the
statements they made yesterday. When people feel more informed
and the problem is simpler, they might dismiss leaders who
acknowledge uncertainty and change their minds as flip-floppers.
I’m still curious about when each mode is most effective for
persuasion, but on balance, I’d love to see more people do their
rethinking out loud, as FDR did. As valuable as rethinking is, we
don’t do it enough—whether we’re grappling with the pivotal
decisions of our lives or the great quandaries of our time. Complex
problems like pandemics, climate change, and political polarization
call on us to stay mentally flexible. In the face of any number of
unknown and evolving threats, humility, doubt, and curiosity are
vital to discovery. Bold, persistent experimentation might be our best
tool for rethinking.
We can all improve at thinking again. Whatever conclusion we
reach, I think the world would be a better place if everyone put on
scientist goggles a little more often. I’m curious: do you agree? If not,
what evidence would change your mind?
Actions for Impact
If you’re interested in working on your rethinking skills, here are my
top thirty practical takeaways.
I. INDIVIDUAL RETHINKING
A. Develop the Habit of Thinking Again
1. Think like a scientist. When you start forming an opinion,
resist the temptation to preach, prosecute, or politick. Treat your
emerging view as a hunch or a hypothesis and test it with data. Like
the entrepreneurs who learned to approach their business strategies
as experiments, you’ll maintain the agility to pivot.
2. Define your identity in terms of values, not opinions. It’s
easier to avoid getting stuck to your past beliefs if you don’t become
attached to them as part of your present self-concept. See yourself as
someone who values curiosity, learning, mental flexibility, and
searching for knowledge. As you form opinions, keep a list of factors
that would change your mind.
3. Seek out information that goes against your views. You
can fight confirmation bias, burst filter bubbles, and escape echo
chambers by actively engaging with ideas that challenge your
assumptions. An easy place to start is to follow people who make you
think—even if you usually disagree with what they think.
B. Calibrate Your Confidence
4. Beware of getting stranded at the summit of Mount
Stupid. Don’t confuse confidence with competence. The DunningKruger effect is a good reminder that the better you think you are,
the greater the risk that you’re overestimating yourself—and the
greater the odds that you’ll stop improving. To prevent
overconfidence in your knowledge, reflect on how well you can
explain a given subject.
5. Harness the benefits of doubt. When you find yourself
doubting your ability, reframe the situation as an opportunity for
growth. You can have confidence in your capacity to learn while
questioning your current solution to a problem. Knowing what you
don’t know is often the first step toward developing expertise.
6. Embrace the joy of being wrong. When you find out you’ve
made a mistake, take it as a sign that you’ve just discovered
something new. Don’t be afraid to laugh at yourself. It helps you
focus less on proving yourself—and more on improving yourself.
C. Invite Others to Question Your Thinking
7. Learn something new from each person you meet.
Everyone knows more than you about something. Ask people what
they’ve been rethinking lately, or start a conversation about times
you’ve changed your mind in the past year.
8. Build a challenge network, not just a support network.
It’s helpful to have cheerleaders encouraging you, but you also need
critics to challenge you. Who are your most thoughtful critics? Once
you’ve identified them, invite them to question your thinking. To
make sure they know you’re open to dissenting views, tell them why
you respect their pushback—and where they usually add the most
value.
9. Don’t shy away from constructive conflict. Disagreements
don’t have to be disagreeable. Although relationship conflict is
usually counterproductive, task conflict can help you think again. Try
framing disagreement as a debate: people are more likely to
approach it intellectually and less likely to take it personally.
II. INTERPERSONAL RETHINKING
A. Ask Better Questions
10. Practice the art of persuasive listening. When we’re trying
to open other people’s minds, we can frequently accomplish more by
listening than by talking. How can you show an interest in helping
people crystallize their own views and uncover their own reasons for
change? A good way to start is to increase your question-tostatement ratio.
11. Question how rather than why. When people describe why
they hold extreme views, they often intensify their commitment and
double down. When they try to explain how they would make their
views a reality, they often realize the limits of their understanding
and start to temper some of their opinions.
12. Ask “What evidence would change your mind?” You
can’t bully someone into agreeing with you. It’s often more effective
to inquire about what would open their minds, and then see if you
can convince them on their own terms.
13. Ask how people originally formed an opinion. Many of
our opinions, like our stereotypes, are arbitrary; we’ve developed
them without rigorous data or deep reflection. To help people
reevaluate, prompt them to consider how they’d believe different
things if they’d been born at a different time or in a different place.
B. Approach Disagreements as Dances, Not Battles
14. Acknowledge common ground. A debate is like a dance, not
a war. Admitting points of convergence doesn’t make you weaker—it
shows that you’re willing to negotiate about what’s true, and it
motivates the other side to consider your point of view.
15. Remember that less is often more. If you pile on too many
different reasons to support your case, it can make your audiences
defensive—and cause them to reject your entire argument based on
its least compelling points. Instead of diluting your argument, lead
with a few of your strongest points.
16. Reinforce freedom of choice. Sometimes people resist not
because they’re dismissing the argument but because they’re
rejecting the feeling of their behavior being controlled. It helps to
respect their autonomy by reminding them that it’s up to them to
choose what they believe.
17. Have a conversation about the conversation. If emotions
are running hot, try redirecting the discussion to the process. Like
the expert negotiators who comment on their feelings and test their
understanding of the other side’s feelings, you can sometimes make
progress by expressing your disappointment or frustration and
asking people if they share it.
III. COLLECTIVE RETHINKING
A. Have More Nuanced Conversations
18. Complexify contentious topics. There are more than two
sides to every story. Instead of treating polarizing issues like two
sides of a coin, look at them through the many lenses of a prism.
Seeing the shades of gray can make us more open.
19. Don’t shy away from caveats and contingencies.
Acknowledging competing claims and conflicting results doesn’t
sacrifice interest or credibility. It’s an effective way to engage
audiences while encouraging them to stay curious.
20. Expand your emotional range. You don’t have to eliminate
frustration or even indignation to have a productive conversation.
You just need to mix in a broader set of emotions along with them—
you might try showing some curiosity or even admitting confusion or
ambivalence.
B. Teach Kids to Think Again
21. Have a weekly myth-busting discussion at dinner. It’s
easier to debunk false beliefs at an early age, and it’s a great way to
teach kids to become comfortable with rethinking. Pick a different
topic each week—one day it might be dinosaurs, the next it could be
outer space—and rotate responsibility around the family for bringing
a myth for discussion.
22. Invite kids to do multiple drafts and seek feedback
from others. Creating different versions of a drawing or a story can
encourage kids to learn the value of revising their ideas. Getting
input from others can also help them to continue evolving their
standards. They might learn to embrace confusion—and to stop
expecting perfection on the first try.
23. Stop asking kids what they want to be when they grow
up. They don’t have to define themselves in terms of a career. A
single identity can close the door to alternatives. Instead of trying to
narrow their options, help them broaden their possibilities. They
don’t have to be one thing—they can do many things.
C. Create Learning Organizations
24. Abandon best practices. Best practices suggest that the ideal
routines are already in place. If we want people to keep rethinking
the way they work, we might be better off adopting process
accountability and continually striving for better practices.
25. Establish psychological safety. In learning cultures, people
feel confident that they can question and challenge the status quo
without being punished. Psychological safety often starts with
leaders role-modeling humility.
26. Keep a rethinking scorecard. Don’t evaluate decisions based
only on the results; track how thoroughly different options are
considered in the process. A bad process with a good outcome is luck.
A good process with a bad outcome might be a smart experiment.
D. Stay Open to Rethinking Your Future
27. Throw out the ten-year plan. What interested you last year
might bore you this year—and what confused you yesterday might
become exciting tomorrow. Passions are developed, not just
discovered. Planning just one step ahead can keep you open to
rethinking.
28. Rethink your actions, not just your surroundings.
Chasing happiness can chase it away. Trading one set of
circumstances for another isn’t always enough. Joy can wax and
wane, but meaning is more likely to last. Building a sense of purpose
often starts with taking actions to enhance your learning or your
contribution to others.
29. Schedule a life checkup. It’s easy to get caught in escalation
of commitment to an unfulfilling path. Just as you schedule health
checkups with your doctor, it’s worth having a life checkup on your
calendar once or twice a year. It’s a way to assess how much you’re
learning, how your beliefs and goals are evolving, and whether your
next steps warrant some rethinking.
30. Make time to think again. When I looked at my calendar, I
noticed that it was mostly full of doing. I set a goal of spending an
hour a day thinking and learning. Now I’ve decided to go further: I’m
scheduling a weekly time for rethinking and unlearning. I reach out
to my challenge network and ask what ideas and opinions they think
I should be reconsidering. Recently, my wife, Allison, told me that I
need to rethink the way I pronounce the word mayonnaise.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
The expression of gratitude is something that probably needs less
rethinking and more doing. I want to start by commending literary
agent extraordinaire Richard Pine for inspiring me to rethink my
audience and continue broadening my lens beyond work, and editor
par excellence Rick Kot for believing in and developing the potential
of these ideas. As always, it was a dream to work with the two of
them, and they offered the ideal blend of challenge and support.
The accuracy of this book was enhanced by the meticulous work
of two professional fact-checkers. Paul Durbin applied his eagle eye
to every sentence, working with remarkable thoroughness and
alacrity. Andy Young carefully reviewed every page and followed up
with a number of key sources.
The content and tone of the book benefited immeasurably from
the early readers in my challenge network. Marissa Shandell and
Karren Knowlton were exceedingly generous in reading more
chapter drafts than any human should endure and unfailingly
brilliant in improving them. I cannot thank them enough for
enriching every section of the book with leads on characters,
suggestions on flow, and refinements on language. Marissa went the
extra mile to enliven concepts and synthesize practical takeaways.
Karren went above and beyond to amplify complexity and diversify
thought.
Reb Rebele, whose taste in ideas and prose is second to none,
dished out the tough love that the early chapters needed and brought
the seasoning that was missing from the denouements. Queen of
signposting Grace Rubenstein offered sage guidance for helping
readers see the forest in the trees and recognize thinking again as a
habit that’s both timely and timeless. Dan O’Donnell helped me deescalate my commitment to a series of dead ends and composed the
written version of jaunty music to animate several key studies and
stories.
Lindsay Miller—the human equivalent of the corpus callosum—
led the cheer for more conversational snippets and richer
illustrations of how the preacher, prosecutor, politician, and scientist
waltz into our psyches. Nicole Granet expanded my thinking around
how rethinking is relevant to every domain of life. Sheryl Sandberg
sharpened the structure by convincing me to introduce the core idea
before the organizing framework, and underscoring the value of wellplaced bookends. Constantinos Coutifaris made the vital point that I
needed to explore when it’s persuasive to preach, prosecute, and
politick. Natalia Villarman, Neal Stewart, and Will Fields shared
their expertise on antiracism. Michael Choo motivated me to go back
to the drawing board on a chapter that wasn’t working. Justin Berg
lent his creative forecasting skills to select and develop my most
novel and useful insights, and also introduced me to the satisfaction
of reverse alliteration (where sequential words share a last letter or
syllable). Susan Grant, ever the English teacher, corrected grammar,
caught typos, and fought with me about the Oxford comma. Sorry,
Mom, that’s one thing I don’t plan to rethink.
Impact Lab reminded me once again how much teachers can
learn from students. Vanessa Wanyandeh challenged me to consider
how power imbalances affect which groups should be doing the
majority of the rethinking and highlight whose responsibility it is to
fight prejudice. Akash Pulluru fearlessly obliterated weak arguments
and debated the principles of good debate. Graelin Mandel called for
more information about when and why task conflict causes
relationship conflict, and Zach Sweeney made a passionate case for
expanding the role of the rethinking cycle. Jordan Lei pushed me to
delve more deeply into the first-instinct fallacy, and Shane Goldstein
took the lead in talking me out of the blank-page epilogue and into
showing some edits and margin notes. Nicholas Strauch requested
more context on how to ask good questions and defended the frog,
and Madeline Fagen suggested more clarity on the distinction
between beliefs and values. Wendy Lee advised me to go into more
detail on expressing confident humility, Kenny Hoang suggested I
demonstrate some of the interpersonal rethinking principles in my
writing, and Lizzie Youshaei called for more analysis of when and
why people are open to being wrong. Meg Sreenivas pointed out
extraneous details, Aaron Kahane clarified confusing arguments, and
Shaheel Mitra suggested the Edgar Mitchell quote.
I was lucky to have the support of top-notch teams at InkWell
(shout-out to Alexis Hurley, Nathaniel Jacks, and Eliza Rothstein)
and Viking (a group of people whose curiosity I miss every week I’m
not writing or launching a book). Special thanks to Carolyn
Coleburn, Whitney Peeling, Lindsay Prevette, and Bel Banta for their
publicity prowess; Kate Stark, Lydia Hirt, and Mary Stone for their
creative marketing; Tricia Conley, Tess Espinoza, Bruce Giffords,
and Fabiana Van Arsdell for their editorial and production expertise;
Jason Ramirez for art direction; Camille LeBlanc for wrangling; and
Brian Tart, Andrea Schulz, Madeline McIntosh, Allison Dobson, and
speed demon Markus Dohle for their ongoing support. Also, it was a
delight to collaborate with Matt Shirley on the charts. Along with
lending his characteristic cleverness and humor, he showed
impressive patience in working to make sure they fit the content and
tone of the book.
A number of colleagues contributed to this book through
conversations. As always, Dan Pink gave excellent input on framing
the idea and tips on relevant research. My colleagues at Wharton—
especially Rachel Arnett, Sigal Barsade, Drew Carton, Stephanie
Creary, Angela Duckworth, Cade Massey, Samir Nurmohamed, and
Nancy Rothbard—modeled many of the principles in the book and
led me to think again about many of the points I was making. I am
also grateful to Phil Tetlock for the preacher-prosecutor-politician
framework and referrals to Kjirste Morrell and Jean-Pierre
Beugoms; Eva Chen, Terry Murray, and Phil Rescober for the
analysis of Jean-Pierre’s forecasts; Bob Sutton for putting Brad Bird
on my radar and analyzing his Incredibles leadership so perceptively,
as well as Jamie Woolf and Chris Wiggum for opening the Pixar
door; Karl Weick for introducing me to Mann Gulch; Shannon
Sedgwick Davis and Laren Poole for putting me in touch with Betty
Bigombe and sharing background on her story; Jeff Ashby and Mike
Bloomfield for the referrals to Chris Hansen and Ellen Ochoa;
Eoghan Sheehy for the connection to Harish Natarajan; and Douglas
Archibald for recommending Ron Berger (props to Noah Devereaux
and the Strive Challenge for that serendipitous conversation). Early
on, Eric Best showed me how rethinking could help people raise the
bar, and Brian Little, Jane Dutton, Richard Hackman, and Sue
Ashford taught me to see rethinking as one of the great joys of being
an organizational psychologist.
Every day, being a parent shows me that we all have the innate
capacity to change our minds. As I finished writing this book during
the pandemic, Henry wondered if the water supply might be affected
and was eager to rethink where we get running water (Is there a tube
that connects the ocean to our house? We might get an octopus!).
When I asked how she convinces me to rethink things, Elena opened
my eyes to a persuasion technique I had completely overlooked
(Puppy dog eyes! Works every time!). When we were considering
various optical illusions for the jacket of this book, Joanna came up
with a better idea (What about a candle with a flame that’s water
instead of fire?). I came away rethinking where creative ideas come
from: if our twelve-year-old can come up with the perfect image for
my book jacket, what else can kids do? I love how happily and
effortlessly our children think again—and how they coax me to do it
more often, too.
My deep gratitude goes to Allison Sweet Grant for her love,
advice, and humor every step of the way. As always, she helped me
rethink many of my assumptions and put up with countless trivial
questions, random requests, and unnecessary debates. I still
pronounce it man-aze, not may-o-naze, but she makes a compelling
point that no one says “Please pass the man”; it’s “Please pass the
mayo.” For the record, I don’t even like mayonnaise.
NOTES
Prologue
The smarter you are: Frank L. Schmidt and John Hunter, “General Mental Ability in the
World of Work: Occupational Attainment and Job Performance,” Journal of Personality
and Social Psychology 86 (2004): 162–73.
the faster you can solve them: David C. Geary, “Efficiency of Mitochondrial
Functioning as the Fundamental Biological Mechanism of General Intelligence (G),”
Psychological Review 15 (2018): 1028–50.
the ability to think and learn: Neel Burton, “What Is Intelligence?,” Psychology Today,
November 28, 2018, www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/hide-and-seek/201811/whatis-intelligence; Charles Stangor and Jennifer Walinga, Introduction to Psychology
(Victoria, BC: BCcampus, 2014); Frank L. Schmidt, “The Role of Cognitive Ability and
Job Performance: Why There Cannot Be a Debate,” Human Performance 15 (2002):
187–210.
“exercise great caution if you decide to change”: A Systematic Approach to the GRE
(New York: Kaplan, 1999).
the majority of answer revisions: Ludy T. Benjamin Jr., Timothy A. Cavell, and
William R. Shallenberger III, “Staying with Initial Answers on Objective Tests: Is It a
Myth?,” Teaching of Psychology 11 (1984): 133–41.
counted eraser marks: Justin Kruger, Derrick Wirtz, and Dale T. Miller, “Counterfactual
Thinking and the First Instinct Fallacy,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology
88 (2005): 725–35.
those who do rethink their first answers: Yongnam Kim, “Apples to Oranges: Causal
Effects of Answer Changing in Multiple-Choice Exams,” arXiv:1808.10577v4, last revised
October 14, 2019, arxiv.org/abs/1808.10577.
considering whether you should change it: Justin J. Couchman et al., “The Instinct
Fallacy: The Metacognition of Answering and Revising during College Exams,”
Metacognition and Learning 11 (2016): 171–85.
The speaker taught them: Charles M. Slem, “The Effects of an Educational Intervention
on Answer Changing Behavior,” Annual Convention of the American Psychological
Association, August 1985, eric.ed.gov/?id=ED266395.
we’re mental misers: Susan T. Fiske and Shelley E. Taylor, Social Cognition: From
Brains to Culture, 2nd ed. (Los Angeles: Sage, 2013).
seizing and freezing: Arie W. Kruglanski and Donna M. Webster, “Motivated Closing of
the Mind: ‘Seizing’ and ‘Freezing,’” Psychological Review 103 (1996): 263–83.
better off in the slow-boiling pot: James Fallows, “The Boiled-Frog Myth: Stop the
Lying Now!,” The Atlantic, September 16, 2006,
www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2006/09/the-boiled-frog-myth-stop-thelying-now/7446/.
“On a big fire”: Norman Maclean, Young Men and Fire, 25th anniversary ed. (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 2017); see also
www.nifc.gov/safety/mann_gulch/event_timeline/event6.htm.
Under acute stress, people typically revert: Barry M. Staw, Lance E. Sandelands, and
Jane E. Dutton, “Threat Rigidity Effects in Organizational Behavior: A Multilevel
Analysis,” Administrative Science Quarterly 26 (1981): 501–24; Karl E. Weick, “The
Collapse of SenseMaking in Organizations: The Mann Gulch Disaster,” Administrative
Science Quarterly 38 (1993): 628–52.
twenty-three wildland firefighters perished: Ted Putnam, “Findings from the
Wildland Firefighters Human Factors Workshop,” United States Department of
Agriculture, Forest Service, Technology & Development Program, November 1995.
Storm King Mountain: John N. Maclean, Fire on the Mountain: The True Story of the
South Canyon Fire (New York: HarperPerennial, 2009).
could have moved 15 to 20 percent faster: Ted Putnam, “Analysis of Escape Efforts
and Personal Protective Equipment on the South Canyon Fire,” Wildfire 4 (1995): 34–
39.
“Most would have lived”: Ted Putnam, “The Collapse of Decision Making and
Organizational Structure on Storm King Mountain,” Wildfire 4 (1995): 40–45.
“dropped their packs”: Report of the South Canyon Fire Accident Investigation Team,
August 17, 1994.
“Without my tools, who am I?”: Karl E. Weick, “Drop Your Tools: An Allegory for
Organizational Studies,” Administrative Science Quarterly 41 (1996): 301–13.
in an “e-group”: Elizabeth Widdicombe, “Prefrosh E-group Connected Class of ’03,”
Harvard Crimson, June 5, 2003, www.thecrimson.com/article/2003/6/5/prefrosh-egroup-connected-class-of-03; Scott A. Golder, “Re: ‘Alone in Annenberg? First-Years
Take Heart,’” Harvard Crimson, September 17, 1999,
www.thecrimson.com/article/1999/9/17/letters-begroup-an-important-link-connecting.
support for the Black Lives Matter movement: Nate Cohn and Kevin Quealy, “How
Public Opinion Has Moved on Black Lives Matter,” New York Times, June 10, 2020,
www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/06/10/upshot/black-lives-matter-attitudes.html.
role that wildfires play in the life cycles of forests: Kathryn Schulz, “The Story That
Tore Through the Trees,” New York Magazine, September 9, 2014,
nymag.com/arts/books/features/mann-gulch-norman-maclean-2014-9/index.html.
Chapter 1. A Preacher, a Prosecutor, a Politician, and a Scientist Walk into Your Mind
“Progress is impossible without change”: George Bernard Shaw, Everybody’s
Political What’s What? (London: Constable, 1944).
Mike Lazaridis has had a defining: Jacquie McNish and Sean Silcoff, Losing the
Signal: The Untold Story behind the Extraordinary Rise and Spectacular Fall of
BlackBerry (New York: Flatiron Books, 2015).
the fastest-growing company: “100 Fastest-Growing Companies,” CNN Money, August
31, 2009, money.cnn.com/magazines/fortune/fortunefastestgrowing/2009/full_list/.
five times as much information: Richard Alleyne, “Welcome to the Information Age—
174 Newspapers a Day,” Daily Telegraph, February 11, 2011,
www.telegraph.co.uk/news/science/science-news/8316534/Welcome-to-theinformation-age-174-newspapers-a-day.html.
medical knowledge was doubling: Peter Densen, “Challenges and Opportunities Facing
Medical Education,” Transactions of the American Clinical and Climatological
Association 122 (2011): 48–58.
become more extreme: Joshua J. Clarkson, Zakary L. Tormala, and Christopher Leone,
“A Self-Validation Perspective on the Mere Thought Effect,” Journal of Experimental
Social Psychology 47 (2011): 449–54.
and more entrenched: Jamie Barden and Richard E. Petty, “The Mere Perception of
Elaboration Creates Attitude Certainty: Exploring the Thoughtfulness Heuristic,”
Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 95 (2008): 489–509.
such subjects as Cleopatra’s roots: W. Ralph Eubanks, “How History and Hollywood
Got ‘Cleopatra’ Wrong,” NPR, November 1, 2010,
www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=130976125.
tyrannosaurs had colorful feathers: Jason Farago, “T. Rex Like You Haven’t Seen
Him: With Feathers,” New York Times, March 7, 2019,
www.nytimes.com/2019/03/07/arts/design/t-rex-exhibition-american-museum-ofnatural-history.html; Brigit Katz, “T. Rex Was Likely Covered in Scales, Not Feathers,”
Smithsonian, June 8, 2017, www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/t-rex-skin-was-notcovered-feathers-study-says-180963603.
sound waves can activate the visual cortex: Alix Spiegel and Lulu Miller, “How to
Become Batman,” Invisibilia, NPR, January 23, 2015,
www.npr.org/programs/invisibilia/378577902/how-to-become-batman.
“blowing smoke up your arse”: Sterling Haynes, “Special Feature: Tobacco Smoke
Enemas,” BC Medical Journal 54 (2012): 496–97.
the Ponzi scheme: Stephen Greenspan, “Why We Keep Falling for Financial Scams,” Wall
Street Journal, January 3, 2009, www.wsj.com/articles/SB123093987596650197.
mindsets of three different professions: Philip E. Tetlock, “Social Functionalist
Frameworks for Judgment and Choice: Intuitive Politicians, Theologians, and
Prosecutors,” Psychological Review 109 (2002): 451–71.
we marshal arguments: Hugo Mercier and Dan Sperber, “Why Do Humans Reason?
Arguments from an Argumentative Theory,” Behavioral and Brain Sciences 34 (2011):
57–74.
guilty of “knee-jerk cynicism”: Stephen Greenspan, “Fooled by Ponzi (and Madoff):
How Bernard Madoff Made Off with My Money,” eSkeptic, December 23, 2008,
www.skeptic.com/eskeptic/08-12-23/#feature.
why we get duped: Greg Griffin, “Scam Expert from CU Expertly Scammed,” Denver
Post, March 2, 2009, www.denverpost.com/2009/03/02/scam-expert-from-cu-expertlyscammed.
scientist is not just a profession: George A. Kelly, The Psychology of Personal
Constructs, vol. 1, A Theory of Personality (New York: Norton, 1955); Brian R. Little,
Who Are You, Really? The Surprising Puzzle of Personality (New York: Simon &
Schuster, 2017).
view startups through a scientist’s goggles: Arnaldo Camuffo et al., “A Scientific
Approach to Entrepreneurial Decision Making: Evidence from a Randomized Control
Trial,” Management Science 66 (2020): 564–86.
when business executives compete: Mark Chussil, “Slow Deciders Make Better
Strategists,” Harvard Business Review, July 8, 2016, hbr.org/2016/07/slow-decidersmake-better-strategists.
“To punish me”: Walter Isaacson, Einstein: His Life and Universe (New York: Simon &
Schuster, 2007).
faster at recognizing patterns: David J. Lick, Adam L. Alter, and Jonathan B. Freeman,
“Superior Pattern Detectors Efficiently Learn, Activate, Apply, and Update Social
Stereotypes,” Journal of Experimental Psychology: General 147 (2018): 209–27.
the smarter you are: Dan M. Kahan, Ellen Peters, Erica C. Dawson, and Paul Slovic,
“Motivated Numeracy and Enlightened Self-Government,” Behavioural Public Policy 1
(2017): 54–86.
One is confirmation bias: Raymond S. Nickerson, “Confirmation Bias: A Ubiquitous
Phenomenon in Many Guises,” Review of General Psychology 2 (1998): 175–220.
The other is desirability bias: Ben M. Tappin, Leslie van der Leer, and Ryan T. McKay,
“The Heart Trumps the Head: Desirability Bias in Political Belief Revision,” Journal of
Experimental Psychology: General 146 (2017): 1143–49; Ziva Kunda, “The Case for
Motivated Reasoning,” Psychological Bulletin 108 (1990): 480–98.
“I’m not biased” bias: Emily Pronin, Daniel Y. Lin, and Lee Ross, “The Bias Blind Spot:
Perceptions of Bias in Self versus Others,” Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin 28
(2002): 369–81.
smart people are more likely: Richard F. West, Russell J. Meserve, and Keith E.
Stanovich, “Cognitive Sophistication Does Not Attenuate the Bias Blind Spot,” Journal of
Personality and Social Psychology 103 (2012): 506–19.
being actively open-minded: Keith E. Stanovich and Maggie E. Toplak, “The Need for
Intellectual Diversity in Psychological Science: Our Own Studies of Actively OpenMinded Thinking as a Case Study,” Cognition 187 (2019): 156–66; Jonathan Baron et al.,
“Why Does the Cognitive Reflection Test (Sometimes) Predict Utilitarian Moral
Judgment (and Other Things)?,” Journal of Applied Research in Memory and Cognition
4 (2015): 265–84.
sharper logic and stronger data: Neil Stenhouse et al., “The Potential Role of Actively
Open-Minded Thinking in Preventing Motivated Reasoning about Controversial
Science,” Journal of Environmental Psychology 57 (2018): 17–24.
“to move from one extreme”: Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, Creativity: Flow and the
Psychology of Discovery and Invention (New York: HarperCollins, 1996).
study of highly creative architects: Donald W. Mackinnon, “The Nature and Nurture of
Creative Talent,” American Psychologist 17 (1962): 484–95.
Experts assessed American presidents: Dean Keith Simonton, “Presidential IQ,
Openness, Intellectual Brilliance, and Leadership: Estimates and Correlations for 42 U.S.
Chief Executives,” Political Psychology 27 (2006): 511–26.
the fat-cat syndrome: Jane E. Dutton and Robert B. Duncan, “The Creation of
Momentum for Change through the Process of Strategic Issue Diagnosis,” Strategic
Management Journal (May/June 1987): 279–95.
“It’s an iconic product”: Jacquie McNish, “RIM’s Mike Lazaridis Walks Out of BBC
Interview,” Globe and Mail, April 13, 2011, www.theglobeandmail.com/globeinvestor/rims-mike-lazaridis-walks-out-of-bbc-interview/article1322202.
“The keyboard is one of the reasons”: Sean Silcoff, Jacquie McNish, and Steve
Laurantaye, “How BlackBerry Blew It,” Globe and Mail, September 27, 2013,
www.theglobeandmail.com/report-on-business/the-inside-story-of-why-blackberry-isfailing/article14563602/.
“We laughed and said”: Jonathan S. Geller, “Open Letter to BlackBerry Bosses: Senior
RIM Exec Tells All as Company Crumbles Around Him,” BGR, June 30, 2011,
bgr.com/2011/06/30/open-letter-to-blackberry-bosses-senior-rim-exec-tells-all-ascompany-crumbles-around-him.
what resurrected Apple: Personal interviews with Tony Fadell, June 1, 2020, and Mike
Bell, November 14, 2019; Brian Merchant, The One Device: The Secret History of the
iPhone (New York: Little, Brown, 2017).
Chapter 2. The Armchair Quarterback and the Impostor
“Ignorance more frequently”: Charles Darwin, The Descent of Man (London: Penguin
Classics, 1871/2004).
“mentally blind to her blindness”: Gabriel Anton, “On the Self-Awareness of Focal
Drain Diseases by the Patient in Cortical Blindness and Cortical Deafness,” Archiv für
Psychiatrie und Nervenkrankheiten 32 (1899): 86–127.
“One of the most striking features”: Frederick C. Redlich and Joseph F. Dorsey,
“Denial of Blindness by Patients with Cerebral Disease,” Archives of Neurology &
Psychiatry 53 (1945): 407–17.
the Roman philosopher Seneca: Charles André, “Seneca and the First Description of
Anton Syndrome,” Journal of Neuro-Ophthalmology 38 (2018): 511–13.
a deficit of self-awareness: Giuseppe Vallar and Roberta Ronchi, “Anosognosia for
Motor and Sensory Deficits after Unilateral Brain Damage: A Review,” Restorative
Neurology and Neuroscience 24 (2006): 247–57; Howard C. Hughes, Robert Fendrich,
and Sarah E. Streeter, “The Diversity of the Human Visual Experience,” in Perception
and Its Modalities, ed. Dustin Stokes, Moham Matthen, and Stephen Biggs (New York:
Oxford University Press, 2015); David Dunning, Self-Insight: Roadblocks and Detours
on the Path to Knowing Thyself (New York: Psychology Press, 2005); Costanza Papagno
and Giuseppe Vallar, “Anosognosia for Left Hemiplegia: Babinski’s (1914) Cases,” in
Classic Cases in Neuropsychology, vol. 2, ed. Christopher Code et al. (New York:
Psychology Press, 2003); Jiann-Jy Chen et al., “Anton-Babinski Syndrome in an Old
Patient: A Case Report and Literature Review,” Psychogeriatrics 15 (2015): 58–61;
Susan M. McGlynn, “Impaired Awareness of Deficits in a Psychiatric Context:
Implications for Rehabilitation,” in Metacognition in Educational Theory and Practice,
ed. Douglas J. Hacker, John Dunlosky, and Arthur C. Graesser (Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum,
1998).
“My experience and knowledge”: Agence France Presse, “Iceland’s Crisis-Era Central
Bank Chief to Run for President,” Yahoo! News, May 8, 2016,
www.yahoo.com/news/icelands-crisis-era-central-bank-chief-run-president152717120.html.
women typically underestimated: Samantha C. Paustian-Underdahl, Lisa Slattery
Walker, and David J. Woehr, “Gender and Perceptions of Leadership Effectiveness: A
Meta-analysis of Contextual Moderators,” Journal of Applied Psychology 99 (2014):
1129–45.
competence exceeds confidence: Mark R. Leary et al., “The Impostor Phenomenon:
Self-Perceptions, Reflected Appraisals, and Interpersonal Strategies,” Journal of
Personality 68 (2000): 725–56; Karina K. L. Mak, Sabina Kleitman, and Maree J.
Abbott, “Impostor Phenomenon Measurement Scales: A Systematic Review,” Frontiers
in Psychology 10 (2019): 671.
Ig™ Nobel Prize: Improbable, “The 2000 Ig™ Nobel Prize Ceremony,” October 5, 2000,
www.improbable.com/ig/2000.
original Dunning-Kruger studies: Justin Kruger and David Dunning, “Unskilled and
Unaware of It: How Difficulties in Recognizing One’s Own Incompetence Lead to
Inflated Self-Assessments,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 77 (1999):
1121–34.
The less intelligent we are: John D. Mayer, A. T. Panter, and David R. Caruso, “When
People Estimate Their Personal Intelligence Who Is Overconfident? Who Is Accurate?,”
Journal of Personality (May 19, 2020).
when economists evaluated: Nicholas Bloom, Renata Lemos, Raffaella Sadun, Daniela
Scur, and John Van Reenen, “JEEA-FBBVA Lecture 2013: The New Empirical
Economics of Management,” Journal of the European Economic Association 12 (2014):
835–76, https://doi.org/10.1111/jeea.12094.
it was most rampant: Xavier Cirera and William F. Maloney, The Innovation Paradox
(Washington, DC: The World Bank, 2017); Nicholas Bloom et al., “Management Practices
across Firms and Countries,” Academy of Management Perspectives 26 (2012): 12–33.
The more superior participants: Michael P. Hall and Kaitlin T. Raimi, “Is Belief
Superiority Justified by Superior Knowledge?,” Journal of Experimental Social
Psychology 76 (2018): 290–306.
“The first rule of the Dunning-Kruger club”: Brian Resnick, “Intellectual Humility:
The Importance of Knowing You Might Be Wrong,” Vox, January 4, 2019,
www.vox.com/science-and-health/2019/1/4/17989224/intellectual-humility-explainedpsychology-replication.
claim knowledge about fictional topics: John Jerrim, Phil Parker, and Nikki Shure,
“Bullshitters. Who Are They and What Do We Know about Their Lives?,” IZA Institute of
Labor Economics, DP No. 12282, April 2019, ftp.iza.org/dp12282.pdf; Christopher
Ingraham, “Rich Guys Are Most Likely to Have No Idea What They’re Talking About,
Study Suggests,” Washington Post, April 26, 2019,
www.washingtonpost.com/business/2019/04/26/rich-guys-are-most-likely-have-noidea-what-theyre-talking-about-study-finds.
“giving a tidy demonstration”: Nina Strohminger (@NinaStrohminger), January 8,
2019, twitter.com/NinaStrohminger/status/1082651708617039875?s=20.
On the questions above: Mark L. Wolraich, David B. Wilson, and J. Wade White, “The
Effect of Sugar on Behavior and Cognition in Children: A Meta-analysis,” Journal of the
American Medical Association 274 (1995): 1617–21; see also Konstantinos Mantantzis et
al., “Sugar Rush or Sugar Crash? A Meta-analysis of Carbohydrate Effects on Mood,”
Neuroscience & Biobehavioral Reviews 101 (2019): 45–67.
people who scored the lowest: Oliver J. Sheldon, David Dunning, and Daniel R. Ames,
“Emotionally Unskilled, Unaware, and Uninterested in Learning More: Reactions to
Feedback about Deficits in Emotional Intelligence,” Journal of Applied Psychology 99
(2014): 125–37.
Yet motivation is only part: Gilles E. Gignac and Marcin Zajenkowski, “The DunningKruger Effect Is (Mostly) a Statistical Artefact: Valid Approaches to Testing the
Hypothesis with Individual Differences Data,” Intelligence 80 (2020): 101449; Tal
Yarkoni, “What the Dunning-Kruger Effect Is and Isn’t,” July 7, 2010,
www.talyarkoni.org/blog/2010/07/07/what-the-dunning-kruger-effect-is-and-isnt.
when they’re offered a $100 bill: Joyce Ehrlinger et al., “Why the Unskilled Are
Unaware: Further Explorations of (Absent) Self-Insight among the Incompetent,”
Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes 105 (2008): 98–121.
We tend to overestimate ourselves: Spencer Greenberg and Seth StephensDavidowitz, “You Are Not as Good at Kissing as You Think. But You Are Better at
Dancing,” New York Times, April 6, 2019,
www.nytimes.com/2019/04/06/opinion/sunday/overconfidence-men-women.html.
simulated zombie apocalypse: Carmen Sanchez and David Dunning, “Overconfidence
among Beginners: Is a Little Learning a Dangerous Thing?,” Journal of Personality and
Social Psychology 114 (2018): 10–28.
patient mortality rates: John Q. Young et al., “‘July Effect’: Impact of the Academic
Year-End Changeover on Patient Outcomes,” Annals of Internal Medicine 155 (2011):
309–15; Sarah Kliff, “The July Effect Is Real: New Doctors Really Do Make Hospitals
More Dangerous,” Vox, July 13, 2014, www.vox.com/2014/7/13/5893653/the-julyeffect-is-real-new-doctors-really-do-make-hospitals-more.
“fiercely loyal henchmen”: Roger Boyes, Meltdown Iceland: Lessons on the World
Financial Crisis from a Small Bankrupt Island (New York: Bloomsbury, 2009).
“arrogance, his absolute conviction”: Boyes, Meltdown Iceland; “Cracks in the Crust,”
Economist, December 11, 2008, www.economist.com/briefing/2008/12/11/cracks-inthe-crust; Heather Farmbrough, “How Iceland’s Banking Collapse Created an
Opportunity,” Forbes, December 23, 2019,
www.forbes.com/sites/heatherfarmbrough/2019/12/23/how-icelands-banking-collapsecreated-an-opportunity/#72693f035e97; “25 People to Blame for the Financial Crisis,”
Time, February 10, 2009,
content.time.com/time/specials/packages/article/0,28804,1877351_1877350_1877340,
00.html; John L. Campbell and John A. Hall, The Paradox of Vulnerability: States,
Nationalism & the Financial Crisis (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2017);
Robert H. Wade and Silla Sigurgeirsdottir, “Iceland’s Meltdown: The Rise and Fall of
International Banking in the North Atlantic,” Brazilian Journal of Political Economy 31
(2011): 684–97; Report of the Special Investigation Commission, April 12, 2010,
www.rna.is/eldri-nefndir/addragandi-og-orsakir-falls-islensku-bankanna-2008/skyrslanefndarinnar/english; Daniel Chartier, The End of Iceland’s Innocence: The Image of
Iceland in the Foreign Media during the Financial Crisis (Ottawa, ON: University of
Ottawa Press, 2011); “Excerpts: Iceland’s Oddsson,” Wall Street Journal, October 17,
2008, www.wsj.com/articles/SB122418335729241577; Geir H. Haarde, “Icelandic
Leaders Accused of Negligence,” Financial Times, April 12, 2010,
www.ft.com/content/82bb2296-4637-11df-8769-00144feab49a; “Report on Iceland’s
Banking Collapse Blasts Ex-Officials,” Wall Street Journal, April 13, 2010,
www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424052702303828304575179722049591754.
“Arrogance is ignorance plus conviction”: Tim Urban, “The Thinking Ladder,” Wait
but Why (blog), September 27, 2019, waitbutwhy.com/2019/09/thinking-ladder.html.
that’s distinct from how much you believe in your methods: Dov Eden, “Means
Efficacy: External Sources of General and Specific Subjective Efficacy,” in Work
Motivation in the Context of a Globalizing Economy, ed. Miriam Erez, Uwe Kleinbeck,
and Henk Thierry (Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum, 2001); Dov Eden et al., “Augmenting Means
Efficacy to Boost Performance: Two Field Experiments,” Journal of Management 36
(2008): 687–713.
Spanx founder Sara Blakely: Personal interview with Sara Blakely, September 12, 2019;
see also Clare O’Connor, “How Sara Blakely of Spanx Turned $5,000 into $1 Billion,”
Forbes, March 26, 2012, www.forbes.com/global/2012/0326/billionaires-12-featureunited-states-spanx-sara-blakely-american-booty.html; “How Spanx Got Started,” Inc.,
January 20, 2012, www.inc.com/sara-blakely/how-sara-blakley-started-spanx.html.
Confident humility can be taught: Tenelle Porter, “The Benefits of Admitting When
You Don’t Know,” Behavioral Scientist, April 30, 2018, behavioralscientist.org/thebenefits-of-admitting-when-you-dont-know.
In college and graduate school: Thomas Gatzka and Benedikt Hell, “Openness and
PostSecondary Academic Performance: A Meta-analysis of Facet-, Aspect-, and
Dimension-Level Correlations,” Journal of Educational Psychology 110 (2018): 355–77.
In high school: Tenelle Porter et al., “Intellectual Humility Predicts Mastery Behaviors
When Learning,” Learning and Individual Differences 80 (2020): 101888.
contributing more to their teams: Bradley P. Owens, Michael D. Johnson, and Terence
R. Mitchell, “Expressed Humility in Organizations: Implications for Performance,
Teams, and Leadership,” Organization Science 24 (2013): 1517–38.
more attention to how strong evidence is: Mark R. Leary et al., “Cognitive and
Interpersonal Features of Intellectual Humility,” Personality and Social Psychology
Bulletin 43 (2017): 793–813.
more time reading material that contradicts: Samantha A. Deffler, Mark R. Leary,
and Rick H. Hoyle, “Knowing What You Know: Intellectual Humility and Judgments of
Recognition Memory,” Personality and Individual Differences 96 (2016): 255–59.
most effective leaders score high in both: Bradley P. Owens, Angela S. Wallace, and
David A. Waldman, “Leader Narcissism and Follower Outcomes: The Counterbalancing
Effect of Leader Humility,” Journal of Applied Psychology 100 (2015): 1203–13; Hongyu
Zhang et al., “CEO Humility, Narcissism and Firm Innovation: A Paradox Perspective on
CEO Traits,” Leadership Quarterly 28 (2017): 585–604.
Halla Tómasdóttir was polling: Personal interview with Halla Tómasdóttir, February
27, 2019.
more than half the people you know have felt like impostors: Jaruwan Sakulku,
“The Impostor Phenomenon,” International Journal of Behavioral Science 6 (2011): 75–
97.
common among women and marginalized groups: Dena M. Bravata et al.,
“Prevalence, Predictors, and Treatment of Impostor Syndrome: A Systematic Review,”
Journal of General Internal Medicine 35 (2020): 1252–75.
the more often they felt like impostors: Basima Tewfik, “Workplace Impostor
Thoughts: Theoretical Conceptualization, Construct Measurement, and Relationships
with Work-Related Outcomes,” Publicly Accessible Penn Dissertations (2019): 3603.
I’ve found that confidence can: Adam M. Grant and Amy Wrzesniewski, “I Won’t Let
You Down . . . or Will I? Core Self-Evaluations, Other-Orientation, Anticipated Guilt and
Gratitude, and Job Performance,” Journal of Applied Psychology 95 (2010): 108–21.
we have something to prove: See Christine L. Porath and Thomas S. Bateman, “SelfRegulation: From Goal Orientation to Job Performance,” Journal of Applied Psychology
91 (2006): 185–92; Samir Nurmohamed, “The Underdog Effect: When Low Expectations
Increase Performance,” Academy of Management Journal (July 26, 2020),
doi.org/10.5465/amj.2017.0181.
make us better learners: See Albert Bandura and Edwin A. Locke, “Negative SelfEfficacy and Goal Effects Revisited,” Journal of Applied Psychology 88 (2003): 87–99.
“Learning requires the humility”: Elizabeth J. Krumrei-Mancuso et al., “Links
between Intellectual Humility and Acquiring Knowledge,” Journal of Positive
Psychology 15 (2020): 155–70.
seek out second opinions: Danielle V. Tussing, “Hesitant at the Helm: The
Effectiveness-Emergence Paradox of Reluctance to Lead” (Ph.D. diss., University of
Pennsylvania, 2018).
the result of progress: Edwin A. Locke and Gary P. Latham, “Building a Practically
Useful Theory of Goal Setting and Task Motivation: A 35-Year Odyssey,” American
Psychologist 57 (2002): 705–17; M. Travis Maynard et al., “Modeling Time-Lagged
Psychological Empowerment-Performance Relationships,” Journal of Applied
Psychology 99 (2014): 1244–53; Dana H. Lindsley, Daniel J. Brass, and James B.
Thomas, “Efficacy-Performance Spirals: A Multilevel Perspective,” Academy of
Management Review 20 (1995): 645–78.
Chapter 3. The Joy of Being Wrong
“I have a degree”: Frasier, season 2, episode 12, “Roz in the Doghouse,” January 3, 1995,
NBC.
a wildly unethical study: Henry A. Murray, “Studies of Stressful Interpersonal
Disputations,” American Psychologist 18 (1963): 28–36.
“Some may have found the experience”: Richard G. Adams, “Unabomber,” The
Atlantic, September 2000, “Letters,”
www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2000/09/letters/378379.
events as “highly agreeable”: Alston Chase, A Mind for Murder: The Education of the
Unabomber and the Origins of Modern Terrorism (New York: W. W. Norton, 2004).
What makes an idea interesting: Murray S. Davis, “That’s Interesting!: Toward a
Phenomenology of Sociology and a Sociology of Phenomenology,” Philosophy of Social
Science 1 (1971): 309–44.
moon might originally have formed: Sarah T. Stewart, “Where Did the Moon Come
From? A New Theory,” TED Talks, February 2019,
www.ted.com/talks/sarah_t_stewart_where_did_the_moon_come_from_a_new_theo
ry.
narwhal’s tusk is actually a tooth: Lesley Evans Ogden, “The Tusks of Narwhals Are
Actually Teeth That Are Inside-Out,” BBC, October 26, 2015,
www.bbc.com/earth/story/20151026-the-tusks-of-narwhals-are-actually-teeth-that-areinside-out.
miniature dictator living inside our heads: Anthony G. Greenwald, “The Totalitarian
Ego: Fabrication and Revision of Personal History,” American Psychologist 35 (1980):
603–18.
“You must not fool yourself”: Richard P. Feynman, “Surely You’re Joking, Mr.
Feynman!”: Adventures of a Curious Character (New York: W. W. Norton, 1985), and
“Cargo Cult Science,” Caltech Commencement, 1974,
calteches.library.caltech.edu/51/2/CargoCult.htm.
“The Industrial Revolution and its consequences”: “Text of Unabomber Manifesto,”
New York Times, May 26, 1996,
archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/library/national/unabom-manifesto-1.html.
when our core beliefs are challenged: Jonas T. Kaplan, Sarah I. Gimbel, and Sam
Harris, “Neural Correlates of Maintaining One’s Political Beliefs in the Face of
Counterevidence,” Scientific Reports 6 (2016): 39589.
trigger the amygdala, the primitive “lizard brain”: Joseph LeDoux, The Emotional
Brain: The Mysterious Underpinnings of Emotional Life (New York: Simon & Schuster,
1998); Joseph Cesario, David J. Johnson, and Heather L. Eisthen, “Your Brain Is Not an
Onion with a Tiny Reptile Inside,” Current Directions in Psychological Science 29
(2020): 255–60.
“Presented with someone else’s argument”: Elizabeth Kolbert, “Why Facts Don’t
Change Our Minds,” New Yorker, February 27, 2017,
www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/02/27/why-facts-dont-change-our-minds.
First, our wrong opinions: Eli Pariser, The Filter Bubble: How the New Personalized
Web Is Changing What We Read and How We Think (New York: Penguin, 2011).
I gave a speech: ideas42 Behavioral Summit, New York, NY, October 13, 2016.
He told me afterward: Personal interview with Daniel Kahneman, June 13, 2019.
Even positive changes: Corey Lee M. Keyes, “Subjective Change and Its Consequences
for Emotional Well-Being,” Motivation and Emotion 24 (2000): 67–84.
evolving your identity: Anthony L. Burrow et al., “Derailment: Conceptualization,
Measurement, and Adjustment Correlates of Perceived Change in Self and Direction,”
Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 118 (2020): 584–601.
you can tell a coherent story: Michael J. Chandler et al., “Personal Persistence, Identity
Development, and Suicide: A Study of Native and Non-Native North American
Adolescents,” Monographs of the Society for Research in Child Development 68 (2003):
1–138.
when people felt detached: Kaylin Ratner et al., “Depression and Derailment: A Cyclical
Model of Mental Illness and Perceived Identity Change,” Clinical Psychological Science 7
(2019): 735–53.
“If you don’t look back”: Personal interview with Ray Dalio, October 11, 2017; “How to
Love Criticism,” WorkLife with Adam Grant, February 28, 2018.
meet Jean-Pierre Beugoms: Personal interviews with Jean-Pierre Beugoms, June 26
and July 22, 2019.
only 6 percent: Nate Silver, “How I Acted Like a Pundit and Screwed Up on Donald
Trump,” FiveThirtyEight, May 18, 2016, fivethirtyeight.com/features/how-i-acted-like-apundit-and-screwed-up-on-donald-trump.
Trump had a 68 percent chance: Andrew Sabisky, “Just-World Bias Has Twisted
Media Coverage of the Donald Trump Campaign,” International Business Times, March
9, 2016, www.ibtimes.co.uk/just-world-bias-has-twisted-media-coverage-donald-trumpcampaign-1547151.
It’s possible to change: Daryl R. Van Tongeren et al., “Religious Residue: Cross-Cultural
Evidence That Religious Psychology and Behavior Persist Following Deidentification,”
Journal of Personality and Social Psychology (March 12, 2020).
“Mastery at manipulating the media”: Jean-Pierre Beugoms, “Who Will Win the
Republican Party Nomination for the U.S. Presidential Election?,” Good Judgment Open,
November 18, 2015, www.gjopen.com/comments/44283.
forecasting skill is less: Philip E. Tetlock and Dan Gardner, Superforecasting: The Art
and Science of Prediction (New York: Random House, 2015); Philip E. Tetlock, Expert
Political Judgment: How Good Is It? How Can We Know? (Princeton, NJ: Princeton
University Press, 2005).
grit and ambition: Uriel Haran, Ilana Ritov, and Barbara A. Mellers, “The Role of
Actively Open-Minded Thinking in Information Acquisition, Accuracy, and Calibration,”
Judgment and Decision Making 8 (2013): 188–201.
The single most important driver: Barbara Mellers et al., “The Psychology of
Intelligence Analysis: Drivers of Prediction Accuracy in World Politics,” Journal of
Experimental Psychology: Applied 21 (2015): 1–14.
The superforecasters updated their predictions: Barbara Mellers et al., “Identifying
and Cultivating Superforecasters as a Method of Improving Probabilistic Predictions,”
Perspectives on Psychological Science 10 (2015): 267–81.
“Although small amounts of evidence”: Kathryn Schulz, Being Wrong: Adventures in
the Margin of Error (New York: HarperCollins, 2010).
They saw their opinions: Keith E. Stanovich and Richard F. West, “Reasoning
Independently of Prior Belief and Individual Differences in Actively Open-Minded
Thinking,” Journal of Educational Psychology 89 (1997): 342–57.
“It’s not a lie”: Seinfeld, season 6, episode 16, “The Beard,” February 9, 1995, NBC.
world’s top forecasters is Kjirste Morrell: Personal interview with Kjirste Morrell,
May 21, 2019.
identifying even a single reason why: Asher Koriat, Sarah Lichtenstein, and Baruch
Fischhoff, “Reasons for Confidence,” Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human
Learning and Memory 6 (1980): 107–18.
the more frequently we make fun of ourselves: “Self-Defeating Humor Promotes
Psychological Well-Being, Study Reveals,” ScienceDaily, February 8, 2018,
www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2018/02/180208104225.htm.
“People who are right a lot”: Mark Sullivan, “Jeff Bezos at re:MARS,” Fast Company,
June 6, 2019, www.fastcompany.com/90360687/jeff-bezos-business-advice-5-tips-
from-amazons-remars?_ga=2.101831750.679949067.1593530400358702464.1558396776.
When men make self-deprecating jokes: Jonathan B. Evans et al., “Gender and the
Evaluation of Humor at Work,” Journal of Applied Psychology 104 (2019): 1077–87.
British physicist Andrew Lyne: John Noble Wilford, “Astronomer Retracts His
Discovery of Planet,” New York Times, January 16, 1992,
www.nytimes.com/1992/01/16/us/astronomer-retracts-his-discovery-of-planet.html.
“the most honorable thing I’ve ever seen”: Michael D. Lemonick, “When Scientists
Screw Up,” Slate, October 15, 2012, slate.com/technology/2012/10/scientists-makemistakes-how-astronomers-and-biologists-correct-the-record-when-theyve-screwedup.html.
admitting we were wrong: Adam K. Fetterman and Kai Sassenberg, “The Reputational
Consequences of Failed Replications and Wrongness Admission Among Scientists,” PLoS
ONE 10 (2015): e0143723.
display of honesty: Adam K. Fetterman et al., “On the Willingness to Admit Wrongness:
Validation of a New Measure and an Exploration of Its Correlates,” Personality and
Individual Differences 138 (2019): 193–202.
“whose fault it is”: Will Smith, “Fault vs Responsibility,” YouTube, January 31, 2018,
www.youtube.com/watch?v=USsqkd-E9ag.
“It was a highly unpleasant experience”: Chase, A Mind for Murder.
unsettled by the content or the structure: See James Q. Wilson, “In Search of
Madness,” New York Times, January 15, 1998,
www.nytimes.com/1998/01/15/opinion/in-search-of-madness.html.
Chapter 4. The Good Fight Club
“Arguments are extremely vulgar”: Oscar Wilde, “The Remarkable Rocket,” in The
Happy Prince and Other Stories, ed. L. Carr (London: Heritage Illustrated Publishing,
1888/2014).
Wilbur and Orville Wright: David McCullough, The Wright Brothers (New York: Simon
& Schuster, 2015); Tom D. Crouch, The Bishop’s Boys: A Life of Wilbur and Orville
Wright (New York: W. W. Norton, 2003); James Tobin, To Conquer the Air (New York:
Free Press, 2003); Peter L. Jakab and Rick Young, eds., The Published Writings of
Wilbur and Orville Wright (Washington, DC: Smithsonian, 2000); Fred Howard,
Wilbur and Orville: A Biography of the Wright Brothers (New York: Ballantine, 1988).
Tina Fey and Amy Poehler: Jesse David Fox, “The History of Tina Fey and Amy
Poehler’s Best Friendship,” Vulture, December 15, 2015,
www.vulture.com/2013/01/history-of-tina-and-amys-best-friendship.html.
Paul McCartney was teaching: Michael Gallucci, “The Day John Lennon Met Paul
McCartney,” Ultimate Classic Rock, July 6, 2015, ultimateclassicrock.com/john-lennonmeets-paul-mccartney.
Ben & Jerry’s Ice Cream: Rosanna Greenstreet, “How We Met: Ben Cohen and Jerry
Greenfield,” Independent, May 28, 1995, www.independent.co.uk/artsentertainment/how-we-met-ben-cohen-and-jerry-greenfield-1621559.html.
what Etty calls relationship conflict: Karen A. Jehn, “A Multimethod Examination of
the Benefits and Detriments of Intragroup Conflict,” Administrative Science Quarterly
40 (1995): 256–82.
I hate your stinking guts: Penelope Spheeris et al., The Little Rascals, directed by
Penelope Spheeris, Universal Pictures, 1994.
you warthog-faced buffoon: William Goldman, The Princess Bride, directed by Rob
Reiner, 20th Century Fox, 1987.
You bob for apples in the toilet: David Mickey Evans and Robert Gunter, The Sandlot,
directed by David Mickey Evans, 20th Century Fox, 1993.
more than a hundred studies: Frank R. C. de Wit, Lindred L. Greer, and Karen A. Jehn,
“The Paradox of Intragroup Conflict: A Meta-analysis,” Journal of Applied Psychology
97 (2012): 360–90.
more original ideas in Chinese technology companies: Jiing-Lih Farh, Cynthia Lee,
and Crystal I. C. Farh, “Task Conflict and Creativity: A Question of How Much and
When,” Journal of Applied Psychology 95 (2010): 1173–80.
innovate more in Dutch delivery services: Carsten K. W. De Dreu, “When Too Little
or Too Much Hurts: Evidence for a Curvilinear Relationship between Task Conflict and
Innovation in Teams,” Journal of Management 32 (2006): 83–107.
make better decisions in American hospitals: Robert S. Dooley and Gerald E. Fryxell,
“Attaining Decision Quality and Commitment from Dissent: The Moderating Effects of
Loyalty and Competence in Strategic Decision-Making Teams,” Academy of
Management Journal 42 (1999): 389–402.
“The absence of conflict”: Kathleen M. Eisenhardt, Jean L. Kahwajy, and L. J. Bourgeois
III, “How Management Teams Can Have a Good Fight,” Harvard Business Review,
July–August 1997, 77–85.
Kids whose parents clash constructively: Kathleen McCoy, E. Mark Cummings, and
Patrick T. Davies, “Constructive and Destructive Marital Conflict, Emotional Security
and Children’s Prosocial Behavior,” Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry 50
(2009): 270–79.
architects were more likely: Donald W. Mackinnon, “Personality and the Realization of
Creative Potential,” American Psychologist 20 (1965): 273–81.
“tense but secure”: Paula Olszewski, Marilynn Kulieke, and Thomas Buescher, “The
Influence of the Family Environment on the Development of Talent: A Literature
Review,” Journal for the Education of the Gifted 11 (1987): 6–28.
“The creative person-to-be”: Robert S. Albert, ed., Genius & Eminence (Oxford:
Pergamon Press, 1992).
It’s called agreeableness: Lauri A. Jensen-Campbell, Jennifer M. Knack, and Haylie L.
Gomez, “The Psychology of Nice People,” Social and Personality Psychology Compass 4
(2010): 1042–56; Robert R. McCrae and Antonio Terraciano, “National Character and
Personality,” Current Directions in Psychological Science 15 (2006): 156–61.
analysis of over 40 million tweets: Bryor Snefjella, Daniel Schmidtke, and Victor
Kuperman, “National Character Stereotypes Mirror Language Use: A Study of Canadian
and American Tweets,” PLoS ONE 13 (2018): e0206188.
to become engineers and lawyers: Henk T. van der Molen, Henk G. Schmidt, and
Gerard Kruisman, “Personality Characteristics of Engineers,” European Journal of
Engineering Education 32 (2007): 495–501; Gidi Rubinstein, “The Big Five among Male
and Female Students of Different Faculties,” Personality and Individual Differences 38
(2005): 1495–503.
If you’re highly disagreeable: Stéphane Côté and D. S. Moskowitz, “On the Dynamic
Covariation between Interpersonal Behavior and Affect: Prediction from Neuroticism,
Extraversion, and Agreeableness,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 75
(1998): 1032–46.
When I studied Pixar: Personal interviews with Brad Bird, November 8, 2018, and April
28, 2020; Nicole Grindle, October 19, 2018, and March 17, 2020; and John Walker,
November 21, 2018, and March 24, 2020; “The Creative Power of Misfits,” WorkLife
with Adam Grant, March 5, 2019; Hayagreeva Rao, Robert Sutton, and Allen P. Webb,
“Innovation Lessons from Pixar: An Interview with Oscar-Winning Director Brad Bird,”
McKinsey Quarterly, April 1, 2008, www.mckinsey.com/business-functions/strategyand-corporate-finance/our-insights/innovation-lessons-from-pixar-an-interview-withoscar-winning-director-brad-bird; The Making of “The Incredibles,” directed by Rick
Butler, Pixar, 2005; Alec Bojalad, “The Incredibles 2: Brad Bird on Family, Blu-Ray
Extras, and More,” Den of Geek, October 24, 2018, www.denofgeek.com/tv/theincredibles-2-brad-bird-on-family-blu-ray-extras-and-more.
disagreeable people speak up more frequently: Jeffery A. LePine and Linn Van
Dyne, “Voice and Cooperative Behavior as Contrasting Forms of Contextual
Performance: Evidence of Differential Relationships with Big Five Personality
Characteristics and Cognitive Ability,” Journal of Applied Psychology 86 (2001): 326–
36.
especially when leaders aren’t receptive: Samuel T. Hunter and Lily Cushenbery, “Is
Being a Jerk Necessary for Originality? Examining the Role of Disagreeableness in the
Sharing and Utilization of Original Ideas,” Journal of Business and Psychology 30
(2015): 621–39.
foster more task conflict: Leslie A. DeChurch and Michelle A. Marks, “Maximizing the
Benefits of Task Conflict: The Role of Conflict Management,” International Journal of
Conflict Management 12 (2001): 4–22.
dissatisfaction promotes creativity only: Jing Zhou and Jennifer M. George, “When
Job Dissatisfaction Leads to Creativity: Encouraging the Expression of Voice,” Academy
of Management Journal 44 (2001): 682–96.
cultural misfits are: Amir Goldberg et al., “Fitting In or Standing Out? The Tradeoffs of
Structural and Cultural Embeddedness,” American Sociological Review 81 (2016):
1190–222.
In building a team: Joeri Hofmans and Timothy A. Judge, “Hiring for Culture Fit Doesn’t
Have to Undermine Diversity,” Harvard Business Review, September 18, 2019,
hbr.org/2019/09/hiring-for-culture-fit-doesnt-have-to-undermine-diversity.
CEOs who indulge flattery: Sun Hyun Park, James D. Westphal, and Ithai Stern, “Set
Up for a Fall: The Insidious Effects of Flattery and Opinion Conformity toward Corporate
Leaders,” Administrative Science Quarterly 56 (2011): 257–302.
when employees received tough feedback: Francesca Gino, “Research: We Drop
People Who Give Us Critical Feedback,” Harvard Business Review, September 16, 2016,
hbr.org/2016/09/research-we-drop-people-who-give-us-critical-feedback.
“murder boards” to stir up: William Safire, “On Language: Murder Board at the Skunk
Works,” New York Times, October 11, 1987,
www.nytimes.com/1987/10/11/magazine/on-language-murder-board-at-the-skunkworks.html.
At X, Google’s “moonshot factory”: Derek Thompson, “Google X and the Science of
Radical Creativity,” The Atlantic, November 2017,
www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2017/11/x-google-moonshot-factory/540648.
“The most essential gift”: The Cambridge Companion to Hemingway, ed. Scott
Donaldson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996).
How well we take criticism: David Yeager et al., “Breaking the Cycle of Mistrust: Wise
Interventions to Provide Critical Feedback across the Racial Divide,” Journal of
Experimental Psychology: General 143 (2014): 804–24.
people who lack power or status: Elizabeth W. Morrison, “Employee Voice Behavior:
Integration and Directions for Future Research,” Academy of Management Annals 5
(2011): 373–412; Charlan Jeanne Nemeth, In Defense of Troublemakers: The Power of
Dissent in Life and Business (New York: Basic Books, 2018).
Agreeable people were significantly more: Jennifer A. Chatman and Sigal G. Barsade,
“Personality, Organizational Culture, and Cooperation: Evidence from a Business
Simulation,” Administrative Science Quarterly 40 (1995): 423–43.
A major problem with task conflict: De Wit, Greer, and Jehn, “The Paradox of
Intragroup Conflict.”
framing a dispute as a debate: Ming-Hong Tsai and Corinne Bendersky, “The Pursuit of
Information Sharing: Expressing Task Conflicts as Debates vs. Disagreements Increases
Perceived Receptivity to Dissenting Opinions in Groups,” Organization Science 27
(2016): 141–56.
why they favor particular policies: Philip M. Fernbach et al., “Political Extremism Is
Supported by an Illusion of Understanding,” Psychological Science 24 (2013): 939–46.
illusion of explanatory depth: Leonid Rozenblit and Frank Keil, “The Misunderstood
Limits of Folk Science: An Illusion of Explanatory Depth,” Cognitive Science 26 (2002):
521–62.
surprised by how much they struggle: Matthew Fisher and Frank Keil, “The Curse of
Expertise: When More Knowledge Leads to Miscalibrated Explanatory Insight,”
Cognitive Science 40 (2016): 1251–69.
how little they actually know: Dan R. Johnson, Meredith P. Murphy, and Riley M.
Messer, “Reflecting on Explanatory Ability: A Mechanism for Detecting Gaps in Causal
Knowledge,” Journal of Experimental Psychology: General 145 (2016): 573–88.
Chapter 5. Dances with Foes
“Exhausting someone in argument”: Tim Kreider, We Learn Nothing: Essays (New
York: Simon & Schuster, 2012).
introduced to Harish: Personal interview with Harish Natarajan, May 23, 2019; “Live
Debate: IBM Project Debater,” IntelligenceSquared Debates, YouTube, February 11,
2019, www.youtube.com/watch?v=m3u-1yttrVw.
evidence that early access to education: Nicholas Kristof, “Too Small to Fail,” New
York Times, June 2, 2016, www.nytimes.com/2016/06/02/opinion/building-childrensbrains.html.
It’s more like a dance: George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, Metaphors We Live By
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980).
what expert negotiators do differently: Neil Rackham, “The Behavior of Successful
Negotiators,” in Negotiation: Readings, Exercises, and Cases, ed. Roy Lewicki, Bruce
Barry, and David Saunders (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1980/2007).
having even one negotiator who brings: Femke S. Ten Velden, Bianca Beersma, and
Carsten K. W. De Dreu, “It Takes One to Tango: The Effects of Dyads’ Epistemic
Motivation Composition in Negotiations,” Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin 36
(2010): 1454–66.
We can demonstrate openness: Maria Popova, “How to Criticize with Kindness:
Philosopher Daniel Dennett on the Four Steps to Arguing Intelligently,” BrainPickings,
March 28, 2014, www.brainpickings.org/2014/03/28/daniel-dennett-rapoport-rulescriticism.
When we concede that someone else: Fabrizio Butera, Nicolas Sommet, and Céline
Darnon, “Sociocognitive Conflict Regulation: How to Make Sense of Diverging Ideas,”
Current Directions in Psychological Science 28 (2019): 145–51.
Her official name is Project Debater: IBM Research Editorial Staff, “Think 2019 Kicks
Off with Live Debate between Man and Machine,” IBM Research Blog, February 12,
2019, www.ibm.com/blogs/research/2019/02/ai-debate-recap-think-2019; Paul Teich,
“IBM Project Debater Speaks to the Future of AI,” The Next Platform, March 27, 2019,
www.nextplatform.com/2019/03/27/ibm-project-debater-speaks-to-the-future-of-ai;
Dieter Bohn, “What It’s Like to Watch an IBM AI Successfully Debate Humans,” The
Verge, June 18, 2018, www.theverge.com/2018/6/18/17477686/ibm-project-debater-ai.
the steel man: Conor Friedersdorf, “The Highest Form of Disagreement,” The Atlantic,
June 26, 2017, www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2017/06/the-highest-form-ofdisagreement/531597.
people tend to see quantity: Kate A. Ranganath, Barbara A. Spellman, and Jennifer A.
Joy-Gaba, “Cognitive ‘Category-Based Induction’ Research and Social ‘Persuasion’
Research Are Each about What Makes Arguments Believable: A Tale of Two Literatures,”
Perspectives on Psychological Science 5 (2010): 115–22.
the quality of reasons matters: Richard E. Petty and Duane T. Wegener, “The
Elaboration Likelihood Model: Current Status and Controversies,” in Dual-Process
Theories in Social Psychology, ed. Shelly Chaiken and Yaacov Trope (New York:
Guilford, 1999).
piling on justifications: John Biondo and A. P. MacDonald Jr., “Internal-External Locus
of Control and Response to Influence Attempts,” Journal of Personality 39 (1971): 407–
19.
convince thousands of resistant alumni: Daniel C. Feiler, Leigh P. Tost, and Adam M.
Grant, “Mixed Reasons, Missed Givings: The Costs of Blending Egoistic and Altruistic
Reasons in Donation Requests,” Journal of Experimental Social Psychology 48 (2012):
1322–28.
are you planning to attend?: Rachel (Penny) Breuhaus, “Get in the Game: Comparing
the Effects of Self-Persuasion and Direct Influence in Motivating Attendance at UNC
Men’s Basketball Games” (honors thesis, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill,
2009).
the person most likely to persuade you: Elliot Aronson, “The Power of SelfPersuasion,” American Psychologist 54 (1999): 875–84.
paying them more: David G. Allen, Phillip C. Bryant, and James M. Vardaman,
“Retaining Talent: Replacing Misconceptions with Evidence-Based Strategies,” Academy
of Management Perspectives 24 (2017): 48–64.
hierarchy of disagreement: Paul Graham, “How to Disagree,” PaulGraham.com, March
2008, www.paulgraham.com/disagree.html.
Beethoven and Mozart: Aaron Kozbelt, “Longitudinal Hit Ratios of Classical Composers:
Reconciling ‘Darwinian’ and Expertise Acquisition Perspectives on Lifespan Creativity,”
Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity, and the Arts 2 (2008): 221–35; Adam Grant, “The
Surprising Habits of Original Thinkers,” TED Talk, February 2016,
www.ted.com/talks/adam_grant_the_surprising_habits_of_original_thinkers.
If we hold an: See Michael Natkin, “Strong Opinions Loosely Held Might Be the Worst
Idea in Tech,” The Glowforge Blog, May 1, 2019, blog.glowforge.com/strong-opinionsloosely-held-might-be-the-worst-idea-in-tech.
in courtrooms, expert witnesses: Robert J. Cramer, Stanley L. Brodsky, and Jamie
DeCoster, “Expert Witness Confidence and Juror Personality: Their Impact on
Credibility and Persuasion in the Courtroom,” Journal of the American Academy of
Psychiatry and Law 37 (2009) 63–74; Harvey London, Dennis McSeveney, and Richard
Tropper, “Confidence, Overconfidence and Persuasion,” Human Relations 24 (1971):
359–69.
woman named Michele Hansen: Personal interview with Michele Hansen, February
23, 2018; “The Problem with All-Stars,” WorkLife with Adam Grant, March 14, 2018.
two-sided messages were more convincing: Mike Allen, “Meta-analysis Comparing
the Persuasiveness of One-Sided and Two-Sided Messages,” Western Journal of Speech
Communication 55 (1991): 390–404.
“I work too hard, I care too much”: The Office, season 3, episode 23, “Beach Games,”
May 10, 2007, NBC.
“My name is George”: Seinfeld, season 5, episode 22, “The Opposite,” May 19, 1994,
NBC.
candidates who acknowledge legitimate weaknesses: Ovul Sezer, Francesca Gino,
and Michael I. Norton, “Humblebragging: A Distinct—and Ineffective—Self-Presentation
Strategy,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 114 (2018): 52–74.
Chapter 6. Bad Blood on the Diamond
“I hated the Yankees with all my heart, even to the point”: Doris Kearns Goodwin,
MLB Pro Blog, doriskearnsgoodwin.mlblogs.com.
Daryl Davis arrived: Personal communications with Daryl Davis, April 10, 2020; Daryl
Davis, “What Do You Do When Someone Just Doesn’t Like You?,” TEDxCharlottesville,
November 2017,
www.ted.com/talks/daryl_davis_what_do_you_do_when_someone_just_doesn_t_like
_you; Dwane Brown, “How One Man Convinced 200 Ku Klux Klan Members to Give Up
Their Robes,” NPR, August 20, 2017, www.npr.org/transcripts/544861933; Craig
Phillips, “Reformed Racists: Is There Life after Hate for Former White Supremacists?,”
PBS, February 9, 2017, www.pbs.org/independentlens/blog/reformed-racists-whitesupremacists-life-after-hate; The Joe Rogan Experience, #1419, January 30, 2020;
Jeffrey Fleishman, “A Black Man’s Quixotic Quest to Quell the Racism of the KKK, One
Robe at a Time,” Los Angeles Times, December 8, 2016,
www.latimes.com/entertainment/movies/la-ca-film-accidental-courtesy-20161205story.html.
most popular T-shirts: Amos Barshad, “Yankees Suck! Yankees Suck!” Grantland,
September 1, 2015, http://grantland.com/features/yankees-suck-t-shirts-boston-redsox.
When asked how much money: Steven A. Lehr, Meghan L. Ferreira, and Mahzarin R.
Banaji, “When Outgroup Negativity Trumps Ingroup Positivity: Fans of the Boston Red
Sox and New York Yankees Place Greater Value on Rival Losses Than Own-Team Gains,”
Group Processes & Intergroup Relations 22 (2017): 26–42.
when Red Sox fans see the Yankees fail: Mina Cikara and Susan T. Fiske, “Their Pain,
Our Pleasure: Stereotype Content and Schadenfreude,” Annals of the New York
Academy of Sciences 1299 (2013): 52–59.
well beyond Boston: Eduardo Gonzalez, “Most Hated Baseball Team on Twitter?,” Los
Angeles Times, July 1, 2019, www.latimes.com/sports/mlb/la-sp-most-hated-mlbteams-twitter-yankees-cubs-dodgers-20190701-story.html.
families self-segregated: Hannah Schwär, “Puma and Adidas’ Rivalry Has Divided a
Small German Town for 70 Years—Here’s What It Looks Like Now,” Business Insider
Deutschland, October 1, 2018; Ellen Emmerentze Jervell, “Where Puma and Adidas
Were Like Hatfields and McCoys,” Wall Street Journal, December 30, 2014,
www.wsj.com/articles/where-adidas-and-pumas-were-like-hatfields-and-mccoys1419894858; Allan Hall, “Adidas and Puma Bury the Hatchet after 60 Years of Brothers’
Feud after Football Match,” Daily Telegraph, September 22, 2009,
www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/germany/6216728/Adidas-and-Pumabury-the-hatchet-after-60-years-of-brothers-feud-after-football-match.html.
we disidentify with our adversaries: Kimberly D. Elsbach and C. B. Bhattacharya,
“Defining Who You Are by What You’re Not: Organizational Disidentification and the
National Rifle Association,” Organization Science 12 (2001): 393–413.
if they were willing to lie: Gavin J. Kilduff et al., “Whatever It Takes to Win: Rivalry
Increases Unethical Behavior,” Academy of Management Journal 59 (2016): 1508–34.
even when the boundaries between them are trivial: Michael Diehl, “The Minimal
Group Paradigm: Theoretical Explanations and Empirical Findings,” European Review
of Social Psychology 1 (1990): 263–92.
a seemingly innocuous question: is a hot dog a sandwich?: Dave Hauser
(@DavidJHauser), December 5, 2019,
twitter.com/DavidJHauser/status/1202610237934592000.
Identifying with a group: Philip Furley, “What Modern Sports Competitions Can Tell Us
about Human Nature,” Perspectives on Psychological Science 14 (2019): 138–55.
after their team won a football game: Robert B. Cialdini et al., “Basking in Reflected
Glory: Three (Football) Field Studies,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 34
(1976): 366–75.
Rivalries are most likely to develop: Gavin J. Kilduff, Hillary Anger Elfenbein, and
Barry M. Staw, “The Psychology of Rivalry: A Relationally Dependent Analysis of
Competition,” Academy of Management Journal 53 (2010): 943–69.
The two teams also have more fans: Seth Stephens-Davidowitz, “They Hook You
When You’re Young,” New York Times, April 19, 2014,
www.nytimes.com/2014/04/20/opinion/sunday/they-hook-you-when-youreyoung.html; J. Clement, “Major League Baseball Teams with the Most Facebook Fans as
of June 2020,” Statista, June 16, 2020, www.statista.com/statistics/235719/facebookfans-of-major-league-baseball-teams.
subject of extensive debate: John K. Ashton, Robert Simon Hudson, and Bill Gerrard,
“Do National Soccer Results Really Impact on the Stock Market?,” Applied Economics 43
(2011): 3709–17; Guy Kaplanski and Haim Levy, “Exploitable Predictable Irrationality:
The FIFA World Cup Effect on the U.S. Stock Market,” Journal of Financial and
Quantitative Analysis 45 (2010): 535–53; Jerome Geyer-Klingeberg et al., “Do Stock
Markets React to Soccer Games? A Meta-regression Analysis,” Applied Economics 50
(2018): 2171–89.
when their favorite soccer team loses: Panagiotis Gkorezis et al., “Linking Football
Team Performance to Fans’ Work Engagement and Job Performance: Test of a Spillover
Model,” Journal of Occupational and Organizational Psychology 89 (2016): 791–812.
pairs of reality goggles: George A. Kelly, The Psychology of Personal Constructs, vol. 1,
A Theory of Personality (New York: Norton, 1955).
phenomenon is called group polarization: Daniel J. Isenberg, “Group Polarization: A
Critical Review and Meta-analysis,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 50
(1986): 1141–51.
Juries with authoritarian beliefs: Robert M. Bray and Audrey M. Noble,
“Authoritarianism and Decision in Mock Juries: Evidence of Jury Bias and Group
Polarization,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 36 (1978): 1424–30.
Corporate boards are more likely: Cass R. Sunstein and Reid Hastie, Wiser: Getting
Beyond Groupthink to Make Groups Smarter (Boston: Harvard Business Review Press,
2014).
Polarization is reinforced: Liran Goldman and Michael A. Hogg, “Going to Extremes for
One’s Group: The Role of Prototypicality and Group Acceptance,” Journal of Applied
Social Psychology 46 (2016): 544–53; Michael A. Hogg, John C. Turner, and Barbara
Davidson, “Polarized Norms and Social Frames of Reference: A Test of the SelfCategorization Theory of Group Polarization,” Basic and Applied Social Psychology 11
(1990): 77–100.
when teams try to downplay: Johannes Berendt and Sebastian Uhrich, “Rivalry and
Fan Aggression: Why Acknowledging Conflict Reduces Tension between Rival Fans and
Downplaying Makes Things Worse,” European Sport Management Quarterly 18 (2018):
517–40.
Upon returning from space: Peter Suedfeld, Katya Legkaia, and Jelena Brcic, “Changes
in the Hierarchy of Value References Associated with Flying in Space,” Journal of
Personality 78 (2010): 1411–36.
“From out there on the moon”: “Edgar Mitchell’s Strange Voyage,” People, April 8,
1974, people.com/archive/edgar-mitchells-strange-voyage-vol-1-no-6.
“On Earth, astronauts look to the stars”: Personal interview with Jeff Ashby, January
12, 2018; “How to Trust People You Don’t Like,” WorkLife with Adam Grant, March 28,
2018.
Manchester United soccer fans: Mark Levine et al., “Identity and Emergency
Intervention: How Social Group Membership and Inclusiveness of Group Boundaries
Shape Helping Behavior,” Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin 31 (2005): 443–
53.
Kelman set out to challenge: Herbert C. Kelman, “Group Processes in the Resolution of
International Conflicts: Experiences from the Israeli-Palestinian Case,” American
Psychologist 52 (1997): 212–20.
we asked UNC students to help: Alison R. Fragale, Karren Knowlton, and Adam M.
Grant, “Feeling for Your Foes: Empathy Can Reverse the In-Group Helping Preference”
(working paper, 2020).
establishes her as different: Myron Rothbart and Oliver P. John, “Social Categorization
and Behavioral Episodes: A Cognitive Analysis of the Effects of Intergroup Contact,”
Journal of Social Issues 41 (1985): 81–104.
“Without sports, this wouldn’t be disgusting”: ESPN College Football,
www.espn.com/video/clip/_/id/18106107.
“You’re actually rooting for the clothes”: Seinfeld, season 6, episode 12, “The Label
Maker,” January 19, 1995, NBC.
A fun but arbitrary ritual: Tim Kundro and Adam M. Grant, “Bad Blood on the
Diamond: Highlighting the Arbitrariness of Acrimony Can Reduce Animosity toward
Rivals” (working paper, 2020).
counterfactual thinking involves: Kai Epstude and Neal J. Roese, “The Functional
Theory of Counterfactual Thinking,” Personality and Social Psychology Review 12
(2008): 168–92.
many stereotypes match up: Lee Jussim et al., “The Unbearable Accuracy of
Stereotypes,” in Handbook of Prejudice, Stereotyping, and Discrimination, ed. Todd D.
Nelson (New York: Psychology Press, 2009).
stereotypes become consistently and increasingly inaccurate: Lee Jussim, Jarret
T. Crawford, and Rachel S. Rubinstein, “Stereotype (In)accuracy in Perceptions of
Groups and Individuals,” Current Directions in Psychological Science 24 (2015): 490–
97.
“if you’re a Virgo in China”: Jackson G. Lu et al., “Disentangling Stereotypes from
Social Reality: Astrological Stereotypes and Discrimination in China,” Journal of
Personality and Social Psychology (2020), psycnet.apa.org/record/2020-19028-001.
our beliefs are cultural truisms: Gregory R. Maio and James M. Olson, “Values as
Truisms: Evidence and Implications,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 74
(1998): 294–311.
there are more similarities: Paul H. P. Hanel, Gregory R. Maio, and Antony S. R.
Manstead, “A New Way to Look at the Data: Similarities between Groups of People Are
Large and Important,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 116 (2019): 541–
62.
interacting with members of another group: Thomas F. Pettigrew and Linda R.
Tropp, “A Meta-analytic Test of Intergroup Contact Theory,” Journal of Personality and
Social Psychology 90 (2006): 751–83.
more likely to privilege their own perspectives: Jennifer R. Overbeck and Vitaliya
Droutman, “One for All: Social Power Increases Self-Anchoring of Traits, Attitudes, and
Emotions,” Psychological Science 24 (2013): 1466–76.
their perspectives are more likely to go unquestioned: Leigh Plunkett Tost,
Francesca Gino, and Richard P. Larrick, “When Power Makes Others Speechless,”
Academy of Management Journal 56 (2013): 1465–86.
Chapter 7. Vaccine Whisperers and Mild-Mannered Interrogators
Marie-Hélène Étienne-Rousseau went into labor: See Eric Boodman, “The Vaccine
Whisperers: Counselors Gently Engage New Parents Before Their Doubts Harden into
Certainty,” STAT, August 5, 2019, www.statnews.com/2019/08/05/the-vaccinewhisperers-counselors-gently-engage-new-parents-before-their-doubts-harden-intocertainty.
its mortality rate: Nick Paumgarten, “The Message of Measles,” New Yorker, August 26,
2019, www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/09/02/the-message-of-measles; Leslie
Roberts, “Why Measles Deaths Are Surging—and Coronavirus Could Make It Worse,”
Nature, April 7, 2020, www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-01011-6.
tried to prosecute the problem: Helen Branswell, “New York County, Declaring
Emergency over Measles, Seeks to Ban Unvaccinated from Public Places,” STAT, March
26, 2019, www.statnews.com/2019/03/26/rockland-county-ny-declares-emergencyover-measles; Tyler Pager, “‘Monkey, Rat and Pig DNA’: How Misinformation Is Driving
the Measles Outbreak among Ultra-Orthodox Jews,” New York Times, April 9, 2019,
www.nytimes.com/2019/04/09/nyregion/jews-measles-vaccination.html.
The results were often disappointing: Matthew J. Hornsey, Emily A. Harris, and Kelly
S. Fielding, “The Psychological Roots of Anti-Vaccination Attitudes: A 24-Nation
Investigation,” Health Psychology 37 (2018): 307–15.
introducing people to the research: Cornelia Betsch and Katharina Sachse,
“Debunking Vaccination Myths: Strong Risk Negations Can Increase Perceived
Vaccination Risks,” Health Psychology 32 (2013): 146–55.
their interest in vaccination didn’t rise at all: Brendan Nyhan et al., “Effective
Messages in Vaccine Promotion: A Randomized Trial,” Pediatrics 133 (2014): e835–42.
what doesn’t sway us: Zakary L. Tormala and Richard E. Petty, “What Doesn’t Kill Me
Makes Me Stronger: The Effects of Resisting Persuasion on Attitude Certainty,” Journal
of Personality and Social Psychology 83 (2002): 1298–313.
the act of resistance fortifies: William J. McGuire, “Inducing Resistance to Persuasion:
Some Contemporary Approaches,” Advances in Experimental Social Psychology 1
(1964): 191–229.
Refuting a point of view: John A. Banas and Stephen A. Rains, “A Meta-analysis of
Research on Inoculation Theory,” Communication Monographs 77 (2010): 281–311.
clinical psychologist named Bill Miller: Personal communications with Bill Miller,
September 3 and 6, 2019.
core principles of a practice called motivational interviewing: William R. Miller
and Stephen Rollnick, Motivational Interviewing: Helping People Change, 3rd ed. (New
York: Guilford, 2012).
a neonatologist and researcher named: Personal interview with Arnaud Gagneur,
October 8, 2019.
In Arnaud’s first study: Arnaud Gagneur et al., “A Postpartum Vaccination Promotion
Intervention Using Motivational Interviewing Techniques Improves Short-Term Vaccine
Coverage: PromoVac Study,” BMC Public Health 18 (2018): 811.
In Arnaud’s next experiment: Thomas Lemaître et al., “Impact of a Vaccination
Promotion Intervention Using Motivational Interview Techniques on Long-Term
Vaccine Coverage: The PromoVac Strategy,” Human Vaccines & Immunotherapeutics 15
(2019): 732–39.
help people stop smoking: Carolyn J. Heckman, Brian L. Egleston, and Makary T.
Hofmann, “Efficacy of Motivational Interviewing for Smoking Cessation: A Systematic
Review and Meta-analysis,” Tobacco Control 19 (2010): 410–16.
abusing drugs and alcohol: Brad W. Lundahl et al., “A Meta-analysis of Motivational
Interviewing: Twenty-Five Years of Empirical Studies,” Research on Social Work
Practice 20 (2010): 137–60.
improve their diets and exercise habits: Brian L. Burke, Hal Arkowitz, and Marisa
Menchola, “The Efficacy of Motivational Interviewing: A Meta-analysis of Controlled
Clinical Trials,” Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology 71 (2003): 843–61.
overcome eating disorders: Pam Macdonald et al., “The Use of Motivational
Interviewing in Eating Disorders: A Systematic Review,” Psychiatry Research 200
(2012): 1–11.
and lose weight: Marni J. Armstrong et al., “Motivational Interviewing to Improve
Weight Loss in Overweight Patients: A Systematic Review and Meta-analysis of
Randomized Controlled Trials,” Obesity Reviews 12 (2011): 709–23.
build grit in professional soccer players: Jonathan Rhodes et al., “Enhancing Grit
through Functional Imagery Training in Professional Soccer,” Sport Psychologist 32
(2018): 220–25.
teachers to nudge students: Neralie Cain, Michael Gradisar, and Lynette Moseley, “A
Motivational School-Based Intervention for Adolescent Sleep Problems,” Sleep Medicine
12 (2011): 246–51.
consultants to prepare teams: Conrado J. Grimolizzi-Jensen, “Organizational Change:
Effect of Motivational Interviewing on Readiness to Change,” Journal of Change
Management 18 (2018): 54–69.
public health workers: Angelica K. Thevos, Robert E. Quick, and Violet Yanduli,
“Motivational Interviewing Enhances the Adoption of Water Disinfection Practices in
Zambia,” Health Promotion International 15 (2000): 207–14.
and environmental activists: Florian E. Klonek et al., “Using Motivational Interviewing
to Reduce Threats in Conversations about Environmental Behavior,” Frontiers in
Psychology 6 (2015): 1015; Sofia Tagkaloglou and Tim Kasser, “Increasing Collaborative,
Pro-Environmental Activism: The Roles of Motivational Interviewing, Self-Determined
Motivation, and Self-Efficacy,” Journal of Environmental Psychology 58 (2018): 86–92.
opened the minds of prejudiced voters: Joshua L. Kalla and David E. Broockman,
“Reducing Exclusionary Attitudes through Interpersonal Conversation: Evidence from
Three Field Experiments,” American Political Science Review 114 (2020): 410–25.
help separated parents resolve disputes: Megan Morris, W. Kim Halford, and
Jemima Petch, “A Randomized Controlled Trial Comparing Family Mediation with and
without Motivational Interviewing,” Journal of Family Psychology 32 (2018): 269–75.
a body of evidence this robust: Sune Rubak et al., “Motivational Interviewing: A
Systematic Review and Meta-analysis,” British Journal of General Practice 55 (2005):
305–12.
When people ignore advice: Anna Goldfarb, “How to Give People Advice They’ll Be
Delighted to Take,” New York Times, October 21, 2019,
www.nytimes.com/2019/10/21/smarter-living/how-to-give-better-advice.html.
sustain talk and change talk: Molly Magill et al., “A Meta-analysis of Motivational
Interviewing Process: Technical, Relational, and Conditional Process Models of Change,”
Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology 86 (2018): 140–57; Timothy R. Apodaca
et al., “Which Individual Therapist Behaviors Elicit Client Change Talk and Sustain Talk
in Motivational Interviewing?,” Journal of Substance Abuse Treatment 61 (2016): 60–
65; Molly Magill et al., “The Technical Hypothesis of Motivational Interviewing: A Metaanalysis of MI’s Key Causal Model,” Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology 82
(2014): 973–83.
“Change talk is a golden thread”: Theresa Moyers, “Change Talk,” Talking to Change
with Glenn Hinds & Sebastian Kaplan.
when people detect an attempt at influence: Marian Friestad and Peter Wright, “The
Persuasion Knowledge Model: How People Cope with Persuasion Attempts,” Journal of
Consumer Research 21 (1994): 1–31.
Betty Bigombe had already hiked: Personal interviews with Betty Bigombe, March 19
and May 8, 2020; see also “Betty Bigombe: The Woman Who Befriended a Warlord,”
BBC, August 8, 2019, www.bbc.com/news/world-africa-49269136.
Joseph Kony was the leader: David Smith, “Surrender of Senior Aide to Joseph Kony Is
Major Blow to Lord’s Resistance Army,” Guardian, January 7, 2015,
www.theguardian.com/global-development/2015/jan/07/surrender-aide-joseph-konyblow-lords-resistance-army.
“truly curious questions”: Kate Murphy, “Talk Less. Listen More. Here’s How,” New
York Times, January 9, 2010, www.nytimes.com/2020/01/09/opinion/listeningtips.html.
an empathetic, nonjudgmental, attentive listener: Guy Itzchakov et al., “The
Listener Sets the Tone: High-Quality Listening Increases Attitude Clarity and BehaviorIntention Consequences,” Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin 44 (2018): 762–
78; Guy Itzchakov, Avraham N. Kluger, and Dotan R. Castro, “I Am Aware of My
Inconsistencies but Can Tolerate Them: The Effect of High Quality Listening on
Speakers’ Attitude Ambivalence,” Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin 43 (2017):
105–20.
people’s attitudes became more complex: Guy Itzchakov and Avraham N. Kluger,
“Can Holding a Stick Improve Listening at Work? The Effect of Listening Circles on
Employees’ Emotions and Cognitions,” European Journal of Work and Organizational
Psychology 26 (2017): 663–76.
working on being better listeners: Guy Itzchakov and Avraham N. Kluger, “The Power
of Listening in Helping People Change,” Harvard Business Review, May 17, 2018,
hbr.org/2018/05/the-power-of-listening-in-helping-people-change.
“How can I tell what I think”: E. M. Forster, Aspects of the Novel (New York: Houghton
Mifflin, 1927/1956); see also Graham Wallas, The Art of Thought (Kent, England: Solis
Press, 1926/2014).
“an inverse charisma”: Wendy Moffat, E. M. Forster: A New Life (London: Bloomsbury,
2011).
managers rated as the worst listeners: Judi Brownell, “Perceptions of Effective
Listeners: A Management Study,” International Journal of Business Communication 27
(1973): 401–15.
their pets were better listeners: “Poll: 1 in 3 Women Say Pets Listen Better Than
Husbands,” USA Today, April 30, 2010,
usatoday30.usatoday.com/life/lifestyle/pets/2010-04-30-pets-vs-spouses_N.htm.
doctors to interrupt their patients: Naykky Singh Ospina et al., “Eliciting the Patient’s
Agenda: Secondary Analysis of Recorded Clinical Encounters,” Journal of General
Internal Medicine 34 (2019): 36–40.
29 seconds to describe their symptoms: M. Kim Marvel et al., “Soliciting the Patient’s
Agenda: Have We Improved?,” Journal of the American Medical Association 281 (1999):
283–87.
Chapter 8. Charged Conversations
“When conflict is cliché”: Amanda Ripley, “Complicating the Narratives,” Solutions
Journalism, June 27, 2018, thewholestory.solutionsjournalism.org/complicating-thenarratives-b91ea06ddf63.
Difficult Conversations Lab: Peter T. Coleman, The Five Percent: Finding Solutions to
Seemingly Impossible Conflicts (New York: PublicAffairs, 2011).
the article framed the debate: Katharina Kugler and Peter T. Coleman, “Get
Complicated: The Effects of Complexity on Conversations over Potentially Intractable
Moral Conflicts,” Negotiation and Conflict Management Research (2020),
onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/ncmr.12192.
simplifying a complex continuum: Matthew Fisher and Frank C. Keil, “The Binary
Bias: A Systematic Distortion in the Integration of Information,” Psychological Science
29 (2018): 1846–58.
the humorist Robert Benchley: “The Most Popular Book of the Month,” Vanity Fair,
February 1920, babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?
id=mdp.39015032024203&view=1up&seq=203&q1=divide%20the%20world.
a phrase from Walt Whitman: Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass, in Walt Whitman: The
Complete Poems, ed. Francis Murphy (London: Penguin Classics, 1855/2005).
“read less like a lawyer’s opening statement”: Ripley, “Complicating the Narratives.”
Yet polls show bipartisan consensus: Mike DeBonis and Emily Guskin, “Americans of
Both Parties Overwhelmingly Support ‘Red Flag’ Laws, Expanded Background Checks
for Gun Buyers, Washington Post–ABC News Poll Finds,” Washington Post, September
9, 2019, www.washingtonpost.com/politics/americans-of-both-parties-overwhelminglysupport-red-flag-laws-expanded-gun-background-checks-washington-post-abc-newspoll-finds/2019/09/08/97208916-ca75-11e9-a4f3-c081a126de70_story.html; Domenico
Montanaro, “Poll: Most Americans Want to See Congress Pass Gun Restrictions,” NPR,
September 10, 2019, www.npr.org/2019/09/10/759193047/poll-most-americans-wantto-see-congress-pass-gun-restrictions.
only 59 percent of Americans: Moira Fagan and Christine Huang, “A Look at How
People around the World View Climate Change,” Pew Research Center, April 18, 2019,
www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2019/04/18/a-look-at-how-people-around-the-worldview-climate-change.
In the past decade in the United States: “Environment,” Gallup,
news.gallup.com/poll/1615/environment.aspx; “About Six in Ten Americans Think
Global Warming Is Mostly Human-Caused,” Yale Program on Climate Change,
December 2018, climatecommunication.yale.edu/wpcontent/uploads/2019/01/climate_change_american_mind_december_2018_1-3.png.
What we believe depends: Ben Tappin, Leslie Van Der Leer, and Ryan Mckay, “You’re
Not Going to Change Your Mind,” New York Times, May 27, 2017,
www.nytimes.com/2017/05/27/opinion/sunday/youre-not-going-to-change-yourmind.html.
higher levels of education predict: Lawrence C. Hamilton, “Education, Politics and
Opinions about Climate Change: Evidence for Interaction Effects,” Climatic Change 104
(2011): 231–42.
“Some still doubt”: Al Gore, “The Case for Optimism on Climate Change,” TED, February
2016, www.ted.com/talks/al_gore_the_case_for_optimism_on_climate_change.
he was called the Elvis: Steven Levy, “We Are Now at Peak TED,” Wired, February 19,
2016, www.wired.com/2016/02/we-are-now-at-peak-ted.
contrasted scientists with “climate deniers”: Al Gore, “We Can’t Wish Away Climate
Change,” New York Times, February 27, 2010,
www.nytimes.com/2010/02/28/opinion/28gore.html.
six camps of thought: “Global Warming’s Six Americas,” Yale Program on Climate
Change Communication, climatecommunication.yale.edu/about/projects/globalwarmings-six-americas.
climate contrarians received disproportionate coverage: Alexander Michael
Petersen, Emmanuel M. Vincent, and Anthony LeRoy Westerling, “Discrepancy in
Scientific Authority and Media Visibility of Climate Change Scientists and Contrarians,”
Nature Communications 10 (2019): 3502.
overestimating how common denial is: Matto Mildenberger and Dustin Tingley,
“Beliefs about Climate Beliefs: The Importance of Second-Order Opinions for Climate
Politics,” British Journal of Political Science 49 (2019): 1279–307.
within denial there are at least six different categories: Philipp Schmid and
Cornelia Betsch, “Effective Strategies for Rebutting Science Denialism in Public
Discussions,” Nature Human Behavior 3 (2019): 931–39.
when journalists acknowledge the uncertainties: Anne Marthe van der Bles et al.,
“The Effects of Communicating Uncertainty on Public Trust in Facts and Numbers,”
PNAS 117 (2020): 7672–83.
when experts express doubt: Uma R. Karmarkar and Zakary L. Tormala, “Believe Me, I
Have No Idea What I’m Talking About: The Effects of Source Certainty on Consumer
Involvement and Persuasion,” Journal of Consumer Research 36 (2010): 1033–49.
media reported on a study: Tania Lombrozo, “In Science Headlines, Should Nuance
Trump Sensation?,” NPR, August 3, 2015,
www.npr.org/sections/13.7/2015/08/03/428984912/in-science-headlines-shouldnuance-trump-sensation.
The actual study showed: Vincenzo Solfrizzi et al., “Coffee Consumption Habits and the
Risk of Mild Cognitive Impairment: The Italian Longitudinal Study on Aging,” Journal of
Alzheimer’s Disease 47 (2015): 889–99.
jolt of instant complexity: Ariana Eunjung Cha, “Yesterday’s Coffee Science: It’s Good
for the Brain. Today: Not So Fast . . .*” Washington Post, August 28, 2015,
www.washingtonpost.com/news/to-your-health/wp/2015/07/30/yesterdays-coffeescience-its-good-for-the-brain-today-not-so-fast.
Scientists overwhelmingly agree: “Do Scientists Agree on Climate Change?,” NASA,
https://climate.nasa.gov/faq/17/do-scientists-agree-on-climate-change; John Cook et
al., “Consensus on Consensus: A Synthesis of Consensus Estimates on Human-Caused
Global Warming,” Environmental Research Letters 11 (2016): 048002; David Herring,
“Isn’t There a Lot of Disagreement among Climate Scientists about Global Warming?,”
ClimateWatch Magazine, February 3, 2020, www.climate.gov/news-features/climateqa/isnt-there-lot-disagreement-among-climate-scientists-about-global-warming.
a range of views on the actual effects: Carolyn Gramling, “Climate Models Agree
Things Will Get Bad. Capturing Just How Bad Is Tricky,” ScienceNews, January 7, 2020,
www.sciencenews.org/article/why-climate-change-models-disagree-earth-worst-casescenarios.
people are more motivated to act: Paul G. Bain et al., “Co-Benefits of Addressing
Climate Change Can Motivate Action around the World,” Nature Climate Change 6
(2016): 154–57.
preserving the purity of nature: Matthew Feinberg and Robb Willer, “The Moral Roots
of Environmental Attitudes,” Psychological Science 24 (2013): 56–62.
protecting the planet as an act of patriotism: Christopher Wolsko, Hector Ariceaga,
and Jesse Seiden, “Red, White, and Blue Enough to Be Green: Effects of Moral Framing
on Climate Change Attitudes and Conservation Behaviors,” Journal of Experimental
Social Psychology 65 (2016): 7–19.
people will ignore or even deny: Troy H. Campbell and Aaron C. Kay, “Solution
Aversion: On the Relation between Ideology and Motivated Disbelief,” Journal of
Personality and Social Psychology 107 (2014): 809–24.
examples of headlines: Mary Annaise Heglar, “I Work in the Environmental Movement.
I Don’t Care If You Recycle,” Vox, May 28, 2019, www.vox.com/thehighlight/2019/5/28/18629833/climate-change-2019-green-new-deal; Bob Berwyn,
“Can Planting a Trillion Trees Stop Climate Change? Scientists Say It’s a Lot More
Complicated,” Inside Climate News, May 27, 2020,
insideclimatenews.org/news/26052020/trillion-trees-climate-change?
gclid=EAIaIQobChMIrb6n1qHF6gIVFInICh2kggWNEAAYAiAAEgI-sPD_BwE.
when news reports about science included caveats: Lewis Bott et al., “Caveats in
Science-Based News Stories Communicate Caution without Lowering Interest,” Journal
of Experimental Psychology: Applied 25 (2019): 517–42.
diversity of background and thought: See, for example, Ute Hülsheger, Neil R.
Anderson, and Jesus F. Salgado, “Team-Level Predictors of Innovation at Work: A
Comprehensive Meta-analysis Spanning Three Decades of Research,” Journal of Applied
Psychology 94 (2009): 1128–45; Cristian L. Dezsö and David Gaddis Ross, “Does Female
Representation in Top Management Improve Firm Performance? A Panel Data
Investigation,” Strategic Management Journal 33 (2012): 1072–89; Samuel R.
Sommers, “On Racial Diversity and Group Decision Making: Identifying Multiple Effects
of Racial Composition on Jury Deliberations,” Journal of Personality and Social
Psychology 90 (2006): 597–612; Denise Lewin Loyd et al., “Social Category Diversity
Promotes Premeeting Elaboration: The Role of Relationship Focus,” Organization
Science 24 (2013): 757–72.
potential is realized in some situations: Elizabeth Mannix and Margaret A. Neale,
“What Differences Make a Difference? The Promise and Reality of Diverse Teams in
Organizations,” Psychological Science in the Public Interest 6 (2005): 31–55.
(and more accurate): “Diversity is good, but it isn’t easy”: Lisa Leslie, “What
Makes a Workplace Diversity Program Successful?,” Center for Positive Organizations,
January 22, 2020, positiveorgs.bus.umich.edu/news/what-makes-a-workplacediversity-program-successful.
“The Mixed Effects”: Edward H. Chang et al., “The Mixed Effects of Online Diversity
Training,” PNAS 116 (2019): 7778–83.
“maintain a consistent narrative”: Julian Matthews, “A Cognitive Scientist Explains
Why Humans Are So Susceptible to Fake News and Misinformation,” NiemanLab, April
17, 2019, www.niemanlab.org/2019/04/a-cognitive-scientist-explains-why-humans-areso-susceptible-to-fake-news-and-misinformation.
divide around emotional intelligence: Daniel Goleman, Emotional Intelligence: Why
It Can Matter More Than IQ (New York: Bantam Books, 1995) and “What Makes a
Leader?,” Harvard Business Review, January 2004; Jordan B. Peterson, “There Is No
Such Thing as EQ,” Quora, August 22, 2019, www.quora.com/What-is-more-beneficialin-all-aspects-of-life-a-high-EQ-or-IQ-This-question-is-based-on-the-assumption-thatonly-your-EQ-or-IQ-is-high-with-the-other-being-average-or-below-this-average.
the comprehensive meta-analyses: Dana L. Joseph and Daniel A. Newman,
“Emotional Intelligence: An Integrative Meta-analysis and Cascading Model,” Journal of
Applied Psychology 95 (2010): 54–78; Dana L. Joseph et al., “Why Does Self-Reported
EI Predict Job Performance? A Meta-analytic Investigation of Mixed EI,” Journal of
Applied Psychology 100 (2015): 298–342.
when people embrace paradoxes: Ella Miron-Spektor, Francesca Gino, and Linda
Argote, “Paradoxical Frames and Creative Sparks: Enhancing Individual Creativity
through Conflict and Integration,” Organizational Behavior and Human Decision
Processes 116 (2011): 229–40; Dustin J. Sleesman, “Pushing Through the Tension While
Stuck in the Mud: Paradox Mindset and Escalation of Commitment,” Organizational
Behavior and Human Decision Processes 155 (2019): 83–96.
beneficial in jobs that involve dealing with emotions: Joseph and Newman,
“Emotional Intelligence.”
a thousand comments poured in: Adam Grant, “Emotional Intelligence Is Overrated,”
LinkedIn, September 30, 2014, www.linkedin.com/pulse/20140930125543-69244073emotional-intelligence-is-overrated.
Some teachers are determined: Olga Khazan, “The Myth of ‘Learning Styles,’” The
Atlantic, April 11, 2018, www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2018/04/the-myth-oflearning-styles/557687.
they don’t actually learn better that way: Harold Pashler et al., “Learning Styles:
Concepts and Evidence,” Psychological Science in the Public Interest 9 (2008): 105–19.
meditation isn’t the only way: Adam Grant, “Can We End the Meditation Madness?,”
New York Times, October 9, 2015, www.nytimes.com/2015/10/10/opinion/can-we-endthe-meditation-madness.html.
the Myers-Briggs personality tool: Adam Grant, “MBTI, If You Want Me Back, You
Need to Change Too,” Medium, November 17, 2015,
medium.com/@AdamMGrant/mbti-if-you-want-me-back-you-need-to-change-tooc7f1a7b6970; Adam Grant, “Say Goodbye to MBTI, the Fad That Won’t Die,” LinkedIn,
September 17, 2013, www.linkedin.com/pulse/20130917155206-69244073-say-goodbyeto-mbti-the-fad-that-won-t-die.
being more authentic: Adam Grant, “The Fine Line between Helpful and Harmful
Authenticity,” New York Times, April 10, 2020,
www.nytimes.com/2020/04/10/smarter-living/the-fine-line-between-helpful-andharmful-authenticity.html; Adam Grant, “Unless You’re Oprah, ‘Be Yourself’ Is Terrible
Advice,” New York Times, June 4, 2016,
www.nytimes.com/2016/06/05/opinion/sunday/unless-youre-oprah-be-yourself-isterrible-advice.html.
the veil of ignorance: John Rawls, A Theory of Justice (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press,
1971).
randomly assigning people to reflect: Rhia Catapano, Zakary L. Tormala, and Derek
D. Rucker, “Perspective Taking and Self-Persuasion: Why ‘Putting Yourself in Their
Shoes’ Reduces Openness to Attitude Change,” Psychological Science 30 (2019): 424–35.
imagining other people’s perspectives: Tal Eyal, Mary Steffel, and Nicholas Epley,
“Perspective Mistaking: Accurately Understanding the Mind of Another Requires Getting
Perspective, Not Taking Perspective,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 114
(2018): 547–71.
Polls show that Democrats: Yascha Mounk, “Republicans Don’t Understand Democrats
—and Democrats Don’t Understand Republicans,” The Atlantic, June 23, 2019,
www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2019/06/republicans-and-democrats-dontunderstand-each-other/592324.
even if we disagree strongly: Julian J. Zlatev, “I May Not Agree with You, but I Trust
You: Caring about Social Issues Signals Integrity,” Psychological Science 30 (2019):
880–92.
“I have a lot of respect”: Corinne Bendersky, “Resolving Ideological Conflicts by
Affirming Opponents’ Status: The Tea Party, Obamacare and the 2013 Government
Shutdown,” Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes 53 (2014): 163–
68.
People get trapped in emotional simplicity: Patti Williams and Jennifer L. Aaker,
“Can Mixed Emotions Peacefully Coexist?,” Journal of Consumer Research 28 (2002):
636–49.
Japanese gives us koi no yokan: Beca Grimm, “11 Feelings There Are No Words for in
English,” Bustle, July 15, 2015, www.bustle.com/articles/97413-11-feelings-there-are-nowords-for-in-english-for-all-you-emotional-word-nerds-out.
The Inuit have iktsuarpok: Bill Demain et al., “51 Wonderful Words with No English
Equivalent,” Mental Floss, December 14, 2015, www.mentalfloss.com/article/50698/38wonderful-foreign-words-we-could-use-english.
kummerspeck, the extra weight: Kate Bratskeir, “‘Kummerspeck,’ or Grief Bacon, Is
the German Word for What Happens When You Eat When You’re Sad,” Mic, December
19, 2017, www.mic.com/articles/186933/kummerspeck-or-grief-bacon-is-the-germanword-for-eating-when-sad.
“Racist and antiracist are not fixed identities”: Ibram X. Kendi, How to Be an
Antiracist (New York: One World, 2019).
Christian Cooper refused: Don Lemon, “She Called Police on Him in Central Park. Hear
His Response,” CNN, May 27, 2020, www.cnn.com/videos/us/2020/05/27/christiancooper-central-park-video-lemon-ctn-sot-intv-vpx.cnn.
Chapter 9. Rewriting the Textbook
“No schooling was allowed to interfere”: Grant Allen [pseud. Olive Pratt Rayner],
Rosalba: The Story of Her Development (London: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1899).
Wisconsin’s Teacher of the Year: Personal interview with Erin McCarthy, January 14,
2020; Scott Anderson, “Wisconsin National Teacher of the Year Nominee Is from
Greendale,” Patch, August 20, 2019, patch.com/wisconsin/greendale/wisconsinnational-teacher-year-nominee-greendale.
It’s “a task that”: Deborah Kelemen, “The Magic of Mechanism: Explanation-Based
Instruction on Counterintuitive Concepts in Early Childhood,” Perspectives on
Psychological Science 14 (2019): 510–22.
don’t have a single right answer: Sam Wineburg, Daisy Martin, and Chauncey MonteSano, Reading Like a Historian (New York: Teachers College Press, 2013).
curriculum developed at Stanford: “Teacher Materials and Resources,” Historical
Thinking Matters, http://historicalthinkingmatters.org/teachers/.
even send students out to interview: Elizabeth Emery, “Have Students Interview
Someone They Disagree With,” Heterodox Academy, February 11, 2020,
heterodoxacademy.org/viewpoint-diversity-students-interview-someone.
think like fact-checkers: Annabelle Timsit, “In the Age of Fake News, Here’s How
Schools Are Teaching Kids to Think Like Fact-Checkers,” Quartz, February 12, 2019,
qz.com/1533747/in-the-age-of-fake-news-heres-how-schools-are-teaching-kids-tothink-like-fact-checkers.
King Tut: Rose Troup Buchanan, “King Tutankhamun Did Not Die in Chariot Crash,
Virtual Autopsy Reveals,” Independent, October 20, 2014,
www.independent.co.uk/news/science/king-tutankhamun-did-not-die-in-chariot-crashvirtual-autopsy-reveals-9806586.html.
when sloths do their version: Brian Resnick, “Farts: Which Animals Do, Which Don’t,
and Why,” Vox, October 19, 2018, www.vox.com/science-andhealth/2018/4/3/17188186/does-it-fart-book-animal-farts-dinosaur-farts.
delivered by lecture: Louis Deslauriers et al., “Measuring Actual Learning versus Feeling
of Learning in Response to Being Actively Engaged in the Classroom,” PNAS 116 (2019):
19251–57.
students scored half a letter grade worse under traditional lecturing: Scott
Freeman et al., “Active Learning Increases Student Performance in Science, Engineering,
and Mathematics,” PNAS 111 (2014): 8410–15.
the awestruck effect: Jochen I. Menges et al., “The Awestruck Effect: Followers Suppress
Emotion Expression in Response to Charismatic but Not Individually Considerate
Leadership,” Leadership Quarterly 26 (2015): 626–40.
the dumbstruck effect: Adam Grant, “The Dark Side of Emotional Intelligence,” The
Atlantic, January 2, 2014, www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2014/01/the-dark-sideof-emotional-intelligence/282720.
In North American universities: M. Stains et al., “Anatomy of STEM Teaching in North
American Universities,” Science 359 (2018): 1468–70.
half of teachers lecture: Grant Wiggins, “Why Do So Many HS History Teachers Lecture
So Much?,” April 24, 2015, grantwiggins.wordpress.com/2015/04/24/why-do-so-manyhs-history-teachers-lecture-so-much.
middle schoolers score higher: Guido Schwerdt and Amelie C. Wupperman, “Is
Traditional Teaching Really All That Bad? A Within-Student Between-Subject
Approach,” Economics of Education Review 30 (2011): 365–79.
enter an “experience machine”: Robert Nozick, Anarchy, State, and Utopia (New
York: Basic Books, 1974).
“I do my thinking through the courses I give”: Asahina Robert, “The Inquisitive
Robert Nozick,” New York Times, September 20, 1981,
www.nytimes.com/1981/09/20/books/the-inquisitive-robert-nozick.html.
“Presenting a completely polished”: Ken Gewertz, “Philosopher Nozick Dies at 63,”
Harvard Gazette, January 17, 2002,
news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2002/01/philosopher-nozick-dies-at-63; see also
Hilary Putnam et al., “Robert Nozick: Memorial Minute,” Harvard Gazette, May 6,
2004, news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2004/05/robert-nozick.
most of us would ditch the machine: Felipe De Brigard, “If You Like It, Does It Matter
If It’s Real?,” Philosophical Psychology 23 (2010): 43–57.
perfectionists are more likely: Joachim Stoeber and Kathleen Otto, “Positive
Conceptions of Perfectionism: Approaches, Evidence, Challenges,” Personality and
Social Psychology Review 10 (2006): 295–319.
they don’t perform any better: Dana Harari et al., “Is Perfect Good? A Meta-analysis of
Perfectionism in the Workplace,” Journal of Applied Psychology 103 (2018): 1121–44.
grades are not a strong predictor: Philip L. Roth et al., “Meta-analyzing the
Relationship between Grades and Job Performance,” Journal of Applied Psychology 81
(1996): 548–56.
Achieving excellence in school: Adam Grant, “What Straight-A Students Get Wrong,”
New York Times, December 8, 2018, www.nytimes.com/2018/12/08/opinion/collegegpa-career-success.html.
the most creative ones graduated: Donald W. Mackinnon, “The Nature and Nurture of
Creative Talent,” American Psychologist 17 (1962): 484–95.
“Valedictorians aren’t likely”: Karen Arnold, Lives of Promise: What Becomes of High
School Valedictorians (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1995).
Dear Penn Freshmen: Mike Kaiser, “This Wharton Senior’s Letter Writing Project Gets
Global Attention,” Wharton School, February 17, 2016,
www.wharton.upenn.edu/story/wharton-seniors-letter-writing-project-gets-globalattention.
one of the best ways to learn is to teach: Aloysius Wei Lun Koh, Sze Chi Lee, and
Stephen Wee Hun Lim, “The Learning Benefits of Teaching: A Retrieval Practice
Hypothesis,” Applied Cognitive Psychology 32 (2018): 401–10; Logan Fiorella and
Richard E. Mayer, “The Relative Benefits of Learning by Teaching and Teaching
Expectancy,” Contemporary Educational Psychology 38 (2013): 281–88; Robert B.
Zajonc and Patricia R. Mullally, “Birth Order: Reconciling Conflicting Effects,” American
Psychologist 52 (1997): 685–99; Peter A. Cohen, James A. Kulik, and Chen-Lin C. Kulik,
“Educational Outcomes of Tutoring: A Meta-analysis of Findings,” American
Educational Research Journal 19 (1982): 237–48.
an ethic of excellence: Personal interview with Ron Berger, October 29, 2019; Ron
Berger, An Ethic of Excellence: Building a Culture of Craftsmanship with Students
(Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, 2003); Ron Berger, Leah Rugen, and Libby Woodfin,
Leaders of Their Own Learning: Transforming Schools through Student-Engaged
Assessment (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2014).
hallmarks of an open mind: Kirill Fayn et al., “Confused or Curious? Openness/Intellect
Predicts More Positive Interest-Confusion Relations,” Journal of Personality and Social
Psychology 117 (2019): 1016–33.
“I need time for my confusion”: Eleanor Duckworth, The Having of Wonderful Ideas
(New York: Teachers College Press, 2006).
Confusion can be a cue: Elisabeth Vogl et al., “Surprised-Curious-Confused: Epistemic
Emotions and Knowledge Exploration,” Emotion 20 (2020): 625–41.
scientifically accurate drawing of a butterfly: Ron Berger, “Critique and Feedback—
The Story of Austin’s Butterfly,” December 8, 2012, www.youtube.com/watch?
v=hqh1MRWZjms.
Chapter 10. That’s Not the Way We’ve Always Done It
“If only it weren’t for the people”: Kurt Vonnegut, Player Piano (New York: Dial Press,
1952/2006).
“scariest wardrobe malfunction in NASA history”: Tony Reichhardt, “The
Spacewalk That Almost Killed Him,” Air & Space Magazine, May 2014,
www.airspacemag.com/space/spacewalk-almost-killed-him-180950135/?all.
in learning cultures, organizations innovate more: Matej Černe et al., “What Goes
Around Comes Around: Knowledge Hiding, Perceived Motivational Climate, and
Creativity,” Academy of Management Journal 57 (2014): 172–92; Markus Baer and
Michael Frese, “Innovation Is Not Enough: Climates for Initiative and Psychological
Safety, Process Innovations, and Firm Performance,” Journal of Organizational
Behavior 24 (2003): 45–68.
make fewer mistakes: Anita L. Tucker and Amy C. Edmondson, “Why Hospitals Don’t
Learn from Failures: Organizational and Psychological Dynamics That Inhibit System
Change,” California Management Review 45 (2003): 55–72; Amy C. Edmondson,
“Learning from Mistakes Is Easier Said Than Done: Group and Organizational Influences
on the Detection and Correction of Human Error,” Journal of Applied Behavioral
Science 40 (1996): 5–28.
the more psychological safety: William A. Kahn, “Psychological Conditions of Personal
Engagement and Disengagement at Work,” Academy of Management Journal 33
(1990): 692–724.
What mattered most was psychological safety: Julia Rozovsky, “The Five Keys to a
Successful Google Team,” re:Work, November 17, 2015,
rework.withgoogle.com/blog/five-keys-to-a-successful-google-team.
psychological safety is not: Amy C. Edmondson, “How Fearless Organizations Succeed,”
strategy+business, November 14, 2018, www.strategy-business.com/article/HowFearless-Organizations-Succeed.
foundation of a learning culture: Amy Edmondson, “Psychological Safety and Learning
Behavior in Work Teams,” Administrative Science Quarterly 44 (1999): 350–83.
engage in self-limiting behavior: Paul W. Mulvey, John F. Veiga, and Priscilla M.
Elsass, “When Teammates Raise a White Flag,” Academy of Management Perspectives
10 (1996): 40–49.
some engineers did raise red flags: Howard Berkes, “30 Years after Explosion,
Challenger Engineer Still Blames Himself,” NPR, January 28, 2016,
www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2016/01/28/464744781/30-years-after-disasterchallenger-engineer-still-blames-himself.
an engineer asked for clearer photographs: Joel Bach, “Engineer Sounded Warnings
for Columbia,” ABC News, January 7, 2006, abcnews.go.com/Technology/story?
id=97600&page=1.
prevent this kind of disaster from ever happening again: Personal interview with
Ellen Ochoa, December 12, 2019.
How do you know?: Personal interview with Chris Hansen, November 12, 2019.
gains in psychological safety a full year later: Constantinos G. V. Coutifaris and
Adam M. Grant, “Taking Your Team Behind the Curtain: The Effects of Leader
Feedback-Sharing, Feedback-Seeking, and Humility on Team Psychological Safety Over
Time” (working paper, 2020).
harsh comments from student course evaluations: Wharton Follies, “Mean
Reviews: Professor Edition,” March 22, 2015, www.youtube.com/watch?
v=COOaEVSu6ms&t=3s.
Sharing our imperfections: Celia Moore et al., “The Advantage of Being Oneself: The
Role of Applicant Self-Verification in Organizational Hiring Decisions,” Journal of
Applied Psychology 102 (2017): 1493–513.
people who haven’t yet proven their competence: Kerry Roberts Gibson, Dana
Harari, and Jennifer Carson Marr, “When Sharing Hurts: How and Why Self-Disclosing
Weakness Undermines the Task-Oriented Relationships of Higher-Status Disclosers,”
Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes 144 (2018): 25–43.
Focusing on results: Itamar Simonson and Barry M. Staw, “Deescalation Strategies: A
Comparison of Techniques for Reducing Commitment to Losing Courses of Action,”
Journal of Applied Psychology 77 (1992): 419–26; Jennifer S. Lerner and Philip E.
Tetlock, “Accounting for the Effects of Accountability,” Psychological Bulletin 125
(1999): 255–75.
we create a learning zone: Amy C. Edmondson, “The Competitive Imperative of
Learning,” Harvard Business Review, July-August 2008, hbr.org/2008/07/thecompetitive-imperative-of-learning.
“will you gamble with me on it?”: Jeff Bezos, “2016 Letter to Shareholders,”
www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1018724/000119312517120198/d373368dex991.htm.
a study of California banks: Barry M. Staw, Sigal G. Barsade, and Kenneth W. Koput,
“Escalation at the Credit Window: A Longitudinal Study of Bank Executives’ Recognition
and Write-Off of Problem Loans,” Journal of Applied Psychology 82 (1997): 130–42.
Chapter 11. Escaping Tunnel Vision
“A malaise set in”: Jack Handey, “My First Day in Hell,” New Yorker, October 23, 2006,
www.newyorker.com/magazine/2006/10/30/my-first-day-in-hell.
the combination of blurting and flirting: William B. Swann Jr. and Peter J.
Rentfrow, “Blirtatiousness: Cognitive, Behavioral, and Physiological Consequences of
Rapid Responding,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 81 (2001): 1160–75.
inspire us to set bolder goals: Locke and Latham, “Building a Practically Useful
Theory.”
guide us toward a path: Peter M. Gollwitzer, “Implementation Intentions: Strong Effects
of Simple Plans,” American Psychologist 54 (1999): 493–503.
they can give us tunnel vision: James Y. Shah and Arie W. Kruglanski, “Forgetting All
Else: On the Antecedents and Consequences of Goal Shielding,” Journal of Personality
and Social Psychology 83 (2002): 1261–80.
escalation of commitment: Barry M. Staw and Jerry Ross, “Understanding Behavior in
Escalation Situations,” Science 246 (1989): 216–20.
entrepreneurs persist with failing strategies: Dustin J. Sleesman et al., “Putting
Escalation of Commitment in Context: A Multilevel Review and Analysis,” Academy of
Management Annals 12 (2018): 178–207.
NBA general managers: Colin F. Camerer and Roberto A. Weber, “The Econometrics
and Behavioral Economics of Escalation of Commitment: A Re-examination of Staw and
Hoang’s NBA Data,” Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization 39 (1999): 59–82.
politicians continue sending soldiers to wars: Glen Whyte, “Escalating Commitment
in Individual and Group Decision Making: A Prospect Theory Approach,”
Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes 54 (1993): 430–55.
searching for self-justifications for our prior beliefs: Joel Brockner, “The
Escalation of Commitment to a Failing Course of Action: Toward Theoretical Progress,”
Academy of Management Review 17 (1992): 39–61.
soothe our egos: Dustin J. Sleesman et al., “Cleaning Up the Big Muddy: A Meta-analytic
Review of the Determinants of Escalation of Commitment,” Academy of Management
Journal 55 (2012): 541–62.
Grit is the combination: Jon M. Jachimowicz et al., “Why Grit Requires Perseverance
and Passion to Positively Predict Performance,” PNAS 115 (2018): 9980–85; Angela
Duckworth and James J. Gross, “Self-Control and Grit: Related but Separable
Determinants of Success,” Current Directions in Psychological Science 23 (2014): 319–
25.
more likely to overplay their hands in roulette: Larbi Alaoui and Christian FonsRosen, “Know When to Fold ’Em: The Grit Factor,” Universitat Pompeu Fabra: Barcela
GSE Working Paper Series (2018).
more willing to stay the course: Gale M. Lucas et al., “When the Going Gets Tough: Grit
Predicts Costly Perseverance,” Journal of Research in Personality 59 (2015): 15–22; see
also Henry Moon, “The Two Faces of Conscientiousness: Duty and Achievement Striving
in Escalation of Commitment Dilemmas,” Journal of Applied Psychology 86 (2001):
533–40.
gritty mountaineers are more likely to die: Lee Crust, Christian Swann, and
Jacquelyn Allen-Collinson, “The Thin Line: A Phenomenological Study of Mental
Toughness and Decision Making in Elite High-Altitude Mountaineers,” Journal of Sport
and Exercise Psychology 38 (2016): 598–611.
what psychologists call identity foreclosure: Wim Meeus et al., “Patterns of
Adolescent Identity Development: Review of Literature and Longitudinal Analysis,”
Developmental Review 19 (1999): 419–61.
settle prematurely on a sense of self: Otilia Obodaru, “The Self Not Taken: How
Alternative Selves Develop and How They Influence Our Professional Lives,” Academy of
Management Review 37 (2017): 523–53.
“one of the most useless questions”: Michelle Obama, Becoming (New York: Crown,
2018).
lack the talent to pursue our callings: Shoshana R. Dobrow, “Dynamics of Callings: A
Longitudinal Study of Musicians,” Journal of Organizational Behavior 34 (2013): 431–
52.
leaving them unanswered: Justin M. Berg, Adam M. Grant, and Victoria Johnson,
“When Callings Are Calling: Crafting Work and Leisure in Pursuit of Unanswered
Occupational Callings,” Organization Science 21 (2010): 973–94.
“Tell the kids”: Chris Rock, Tamborine, directed by Bo Burnham, Netflix, 2018.
introducing them to science differently: Ryan F. Lei et al., “Children Lose Confidence
in Their Potential to ‘Be Scientists,’ but Not in Their Capacity to ‘Do Science,’”
Developmental Science 22 (2019): e12837.
prekindergarten students express more interest: Marjorie Rhodes, Amanda
Cardarelli, and Sarah-Jane Leslie, “Asking Young Children to ‘Do Science’ Instead of ‘Be
Scientists’ Increases Science Engagement in a Randomized Field Experiment,” PNAS 117
(2020): 9808–14.
holding a dozen different jobs: Alison Doyle, “How Often Do People Change Jobs
during a Lifetime?,” The Balance Careers, June 15, 2020,
www.thebalancecareers.com/how-often-do-people-change-jobs-2060467.
tuned out their mentors: Shoshana R. Dobrow and Jennifer Tosti-Kharas, “Listen to
Your Heart? Calling and Receptivity to Career Advice,” Journal of Career Assessment 20
(2012): 264–80.
we develop compensatory conviction: Ian McGregor et al., “Compensatory Conviction
in the Face of Personal Uncertainty: Going to Extremes and Being Oneself,” Journal of
Personality and Social Psychology 80 (2001): 472–88.
graduates of universities in England and Wales: Ofer Malamud, “Breadth Versus
Depth: The Timing of Specialization in Higher Education,” Labour 24 (2010): 359–90.
as people consider career choices and transitions: Herminia Ibarra, Working
Identity: Unconventional Strategies for Reinventing Your Career (Boston: Harvard
Business School Press, 2003).
entertain possible selves: Herminia Ibarra, “Provisional Selves: Experimenting with
Image and Identity in Professional Adaptation,” Administrative Science Quarterly 44
(1999): 764–91.
the more people value happiness: Iris B. Mauss et al., “Can Seeking Happiness Make
People Unhappy? Paradoxical Effects of Valuing Happiness,” Emotion 11 (2011): 807–15.
a risk factor for depression: Brett Q. Ford et al., “Desperately Seeking Happiness:
Valuing Happiness Is Associated with Symptoms and Diagnosis of Depression,” Journal
of Social and Clinical Psychology 33 (2014): 890–905.
ruminate about why our lives aren’t more joyful: Lucy McGuirk et al., “Does a
Culture of Happiness Increase Rumination Over Failure?,” Emotion 18 (2018): 755–64.
happiness depends more on the frequency: Ed Diener, Ed Sandvik, and William
Pavot, “Happiness Is the Frequency, Not the Intensity, of Positive versus Negative
Affect,” in Subjective Well-Being: An Interdisciplinary Perspective, ed. Fritz Strack,
Michael Argyle, and Norbert Schwartz (New York: Pergamon, 1991).
meaning is healthier than happiness: Barbara L. Fredrickson et al., “A Functional
Genomic Perspective on Human Well-Being,” PNAS 110 (2013): 13684–89; Emily
Esfahani Smith, “Meaning Is Healthier Than Happiness,” The Atlantic, August 1, 2013,
www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2013/08/meaning-is-healthier-thanhappiness/278250.
meaning tends to last: Jon M. Jachimowicz et al., “Igniting Passion from Within: How
Lay Beliefs Guide the Pursuit of Work Passion and Influence Turnover,” PsyArXiv
10.31234/osf.io/qj6y9, last revised July 2, 2018, https://psyarxiv.com/qj6y9/.
people prioritize social engagement: Brett Q. Ford et al., “Culture Shapes Whether the
Pursuit of Happiness Predicts Higher or Lower Well-Being,” Journal of Experimental
Psychology: General 144 (2015): 1053–62.
“you’re still gonna be you on vacation”: Saturday Night Live, season 44, episode 19,
“Adam Sandler,” May 4, 2019, NBC.
joy that those choices bring about is typically temporary: Elizabeth W. Dunn,
Timothy D. Wilson, and Daniel T. Gilbert, “Location, Location, Location: The
Misprediction of Satisfaction in Housing Lotteries,” Personality and Social Psychology
Bulletin 29 (2003): 1421–32; Kent C. H. Lam et al., “Cultural Differences in Affective
Forecasting: The Role of Focalism,” Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin 31
(2005): 1296–309.
“You can’t get away from yourself”: Ernest Hemingway, The Sun Also Rises (New
York: Scribner, 1926/2014).
students who changed their actions: Kennon M. Sheldon and Sonja Lyubomirsky,
“Achieving Sustainable Gains in Happiness: Change Your Actions, Not Your
Circumstances,” Journal of Happiness Studies 7 (2006): 55–86; Kennon M. Sheldon
and Sonja Lyubomirsky, “Change Your Actions, Not Your Circumstances: An
Experimental Test of the Sustainable Happiness Model,” in Happiness, Economics, and
Politics: Towards a Multi-disciplinary Approach, ed. Amitava Krishna Dutt and
Benjamin Radcliff (Cheltenham, UK: Edward Elgar, 2009).
built their own microcommunity: Jane E. Dutton and Belle Rose Ragins, Exploring
Positive Relationships at Work: Building a Theoretical and Research Foundation
(Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum, 2007).
passions are often developed, not discovered: Paul A. O’Keefe, Carol S. Dweck, and
Gregory M. Walton, “Implicit Theories of Interest: Finding Your Passion or Developing
It?,” Psychological Science 29 (2018): 1653–64.
Their passion grew as they gained momentum: Michael M. Gielnik et al., “‘I Put in
Effort, Therefore I Am Passionate’: Investigating the Path from Effort to Passion in
Entrepreneurship,” Academy of Management Journal 58 (2015): 1012–31.
actions that benefit others: Adam M. Grant, “The Significance of Task Significance: Job
Performance Effects, Relational Mechanisms, and Boundary Conditions,” Journal of
Applied Psychology 93 (2008): 108–24; Stephen E. Humphrey, Jennifer D. Nahrgang,
and Frederick P. Morgeson, “Integrating Motivational, Social, and Contextual Work
Design Features: A Meta-analytic Summary and Theoretical Extension of the Work
Design Literature,” Journal of Applied Psychology 92 (2007): 1332–56; Brent D. Rosso,
Kathryn H. Dekas, and Amy Wrzesniewski, “On the Meaning of Work: A Theoretical
Integration and Review,” Research in Organizational Behavior 30 (2010): 91–127.
we feel we have more to give: Dan P. McAdams, “Generativity in Midlife,” Handbook of
Midlife Development, ed. Margie E. Lachman (New York: Wiley, 2001).
“they find happiness by the way”: John Stuart Mill, Autobiography (New York:
Penguin Classics, 1883/1990).
what scientists call open systems: Ludwig von Bertalanffy, General System Theory:
Foundations, Development, Applications (New York: Braziller, 1969).
open systems are governed: Arie W. Kruglanski et al., “The Architecture of Goal
Systems: Multifinality, Equifinality, and Counterfinality in Means-Ends Relations,”
Advances in Motivation Science 2 (2015): 69–98; Dante Cicchetti and Fred A. Rogosch,
“Equifinality and Multifinality in Developmental Psychopathology,” Development and
Psychopathology 8 (1996): 597–600.
“you can make the whole trip that way”: Nancy Groves, “EL Doctorow in Quotes: 15 of
His Best,” Guardian, July 21, 2015, www.theguardian.com/books/2015/jul/22/eldoctorow-in-quotes-15-of-his-best.
rethink their roles through job crafting: Amy Wrzesniewski and Jane E. Dutton,
“Crafting a Job: Revisioning Employees as Active Crafters of Their Work,” Academy of
Management Review 26 (2001): 179–201.
how grateful they were for Candice Walker: Amy Wrzesniewski and Jane Dutton,
“Having a Calling and Crafting a Job: The Case of Candice Billups,” William Davidson
Institute, University of Michigan, November 12, 2009.
ended up rethinking their roles: Amy Wrzesniewski, Jane E. Dutton, and Gelaye
Debebe, “Interpersonal Sensemaking and the Meaning of Work,” Research in
Organizational Behavior 25 (2003): 93–135.
“No, it’s not part of my job”: “A World without Bosses,” WorkLife with Adam Grant,
April 11, 2018.
Epilogue
“‘What I believe’”: Candace Falk, Barry Pateman, and Jessica Moran, eds., Emma
Goldman, vol. 2, A Documentary History of the American Years (Champaign:
University of Illinois Press, 2008).
“write a book that ended with the word Mayonnaise”: Richard Brautigan, Trout
Fishing in America (New York: Delta, 1967).
“A new scientific truth”: Max K. Planck, Scientific Autobiography and Other Papers
(New York: Greenwood, 1950/1968).
generations are replaced: “Societies Change Their Minds Faster Than People Do,”
Economist, October 31, 2019, www.economist.com/graphic-detail/2019/10/31/societieschange-their-minds-faster-than-people-do.
the word scientist is relatively new: William Whewell, The Philosophy of the Inductive
Sciences (New York: Johnson, 1840/1967); “William Whewell,” Stanford Encyclopedia
of Philosophy, December 23, 2000, last revised September 22, 2017,
plato.stanford.edu/entries/whewell.
“above all, try something”: Franklin D. Roosevelt, “Address at Oglethorpe University,”
May 22, 1932, www.presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/address-oglethorpe-universityatlanta-georgia.
“something unspecified is no better than nothing”: “Hoover and Roosevelt,” New
York Times, May 24, 1932, www.nytimes.com/1932/05/24/archives/hoover-androosevelt.html.
act of political stupidity: Paul Stephen Hudson, “A Call for ‘Bold Persistent
Experimentation’: FDR’s Oglethorpe University Commencement Address, 1932,”
Georgia Historical Quarterly (Summer 1994),
https://georgiainfo.galileo.usg.edu/topics/history/related_article/progressive-eraworld-war-ii-1901-1945/background-to-fdrs-ties-to-georgia/a-call-for-bold-persistentexperimentation-fdrs-oglethorpe-university-comme.
ILLUSTRATION CREDITS
Charts: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27,
28, 29, 30, 31, 32, 33, and 34 by Matt Shirley.
35: Jason Adam Katzenstein/The New Yorker Collection/The Cartoon Bank; © Condé
Nast.
36: Nicholas Bloom, Renata Lemos, Raffaella Sadun, Daniela Scur, and John Van
Reenen. “JEEA-FBBVA Lecture 2013: The New Empirical Economics of Management,”
Journal of the European Economic Association 12, no. 4 (August 1, 2014): 835–76.
https://doi.org/10.1111/jeea.12094.
37: Zach Weinersmith/www.smbc-comics.com.
38: C. Sanchez and D. Dunning. “Overconfidence Among Beginners: Is a Little Learning a
Dangerous Thing?” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 114, no. 1 (2018), 10–28.
https://doi.org/10.1037/pspa0000102.
39, 40, 41: © Doug Savage, www.savagechickens.com.
42: Ellis Rosen/The New Yorker Collection/The Cartoon Bank; © Condé Nast.
43: David Sipress/The New Yorker Collection/The Cartoon Bank; © Condé Nast.
44: CreateDebate user Loudacris/CC BY 3.0.
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0.
45: Map by casinoinsider.com.
46 and 47: wordle.net.
48: Calvin & Hobbes © 1993 Watterson. Reprinted with permission of ANDREWS
MCMEEL SYNDICATION. All rights reserved.
49: Non Sequitur © 2016 Wiley Ink, Inc. Dist. by ANDREWS MCMEEL SYNDICATION.
Reprinted with permission. All rights reserved.
50: A. Leiserowitz, E. Maibach, S. Rosenthal, J. Kotcher, P. Bergquist, M. Ballew, M.
Goldberg, and A. Gustafson. “Climate Change in the American Mind: November 2019.” Yale
University and George Mason University. New Haven, CT: Yale Program on Climate Change
Communication, 2019.
51: xkcd.com.
52: Katharina Kugler.
53: © JimBenton.com.
54: Steve Macone/The New Yorker Collection/The Cartoon Bank; © Condé Nast.
55: www.CartoonCollections.com.
56: © 2020 EL Education.
57: © Chris Madden.
58: Hayley Lewis, Sketchnote summary of A Spectrum of Reasons for Failure. © 2020
HALO Psychology Limited. Illustration drawn May 2020. London, United Kingdom. /
Edmondson, A. C. (2011, April). From “Strategies for Learning from Failure,” Harvard
Business Review. https://hbr.org/2011/04/strategies-for-learning-from-failure. This
illustration is protected by UK and International copyright laws. Reproduction and
distribution of the illustration without prior written permission of the artist is prohibited.
59: Cartoon © by Guy Downes. For more information: www.officeguycartoons.com.
60: Photo by Arthur Gebuys Photography/Shutterstock.
61: Saturday Night Live/NBC.
ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ
INDEX
The page numbers in this index refer to the printed version of this book. The link provided
will take you to the beginning of that print page. You may need to scroll forward from that
location to find the corresponding reference on your e-reader.
Page numbers in italics refer to charts and illustrations.
abortion, conversations on, 163–64, 165–66
active learning, 186–88
lectures vs., 190–93, 196
addiction:
motivational interviewing as tool for combating, 149
as reinforced by failed arguments against, 146
agreeableness, 81–82
as barrier to rethinking, 83
social harmony vs. cognitive consensus in, 89
see also disagreeable people
Albert, Robert, 80–81
Allen, Grant, 185
Amazon, 218, 219
amygdala, and attacks on core beliefs, 60
animosity, stereotypes and, 127
Anton, Gabriel, 33–34
Anton’s syndrome, 33–35
Apple, iPhone introduced by, 29–31
approval, desire for, politician mindset and, 18–19, 21, 22, 22, 28, 80, 233
Arbery, Ahmaud, 10
arguments:
hierarchy of, 114, 114
prosecutor mindset and, 18, 19, 26, 233
see also debates
Aristotle, 247–48
armchair quarterback syndrome, 37
as barrier to rethinking, 42
impostor syndrome vs., 51
Arnold, Karen, 195
arrogance, 54
humility vs., 45
Ashby, Jeff, 129
Asimov, Isaac, 59
assumptions, 8, 9–12
active questioning of, 25
learning to rethink, 18
astrological signs, stereotyping and, 137–39
astronauts, overview effect and, 128–29
attachment, to erroneous ideas, 62
Austin (first grader), 201–2
autism, vaccination mistakenly linked to, 144, 158–59
awestruck effect, 192
Barsade, Sigal, 89
Battier, Shane, 131
Beethoven, Ludwig van, 114–15
beliefs and opinions, 26
attachment to, 62
attacks on, as threats to sense of self, 59–60, 63–64, 127
biases and, see biases
blind spots in, 75
calcification of, 4, 10, 17
challenges to, as opportunities for rethinking, 74, 75–76
convincing others to rethink, 97–160
core values vs., 64, 66n, 251
counterfactual thinking and, 137–39
debates about, see debates
detaching sense of self from, 12, 62–64, 69–70, 74, 76, 251–52
erroneous, see erroneous thinking
evidence vs., 24–25, 48, 73
evolution of, 26, 58
freedom of choice in, 60, 148, 255
Murray’s experiment on, 55–58, 60, 74–75
need for rethinking of, 12, 17, 18, 24, 55–76, 243
overconfidence and, 44
politician mindset in, see politician mindset
preacher mindset in, see preacher mindset
prosecutor mindset in, see prosecutor mindset
as reinforced by failed arguments against, 144–45
scientist mindset in, see scientist mindset
second opinions and, 18, 52
staying true to, 16
weakly held, 59, 116–17
Benchley, Robert, 165
Berger, Ron, 198–203, 246
best practices, process accountability vs., 216–19, 256
Beugoms, Jean-Pierre, 65–66
election forecasting by, 66–67, 69–71, 70, 71, 72–73
and joy of being wrong, 70, 71–72
scientist mindset of, 66–67
Bezos, Jeff, 72, 219
Bhutan, Gross National Happiness index of, 237
biases:
binary, 165–66, 169, 181
confirmation, 25, 174n, 252
denial of, 25
desirability, 25, 168, 173, 174n
status quo, 194n
Bigombe, Betty, in Uganda peace talks, 155–57, 159
binary bias, 165–66, 169, 181
Bird, Brad, 83, 87–88, 89
BlackBerry, 16, 23, 29, 31
Black Lives Matter movement, 10
Blakely, Sara, 47
blindness, patients’ denial of, 33–35
blind spots, mental, 60
as barrier to rethinking, 35
confidence and, 41, 45
recognition of, 54
self-awareness and, 48
blirtatiousness, 226–27
Boodman, Eric, 148
Boston Red Sox, Yankees’ rivalry with, 122–24, 126–27, 128, 133–36
brain, reward centers in, 123
Brautigan, Richard, 245n
Breuhaus, Rachel, 111
Brexit, 66, 69
business, motivational interviewing in, 151–53
career choices, 225–43
as actions vs. identities, 230
author and, 225–26
escalation of commitment in, 229–30
of Ryan Grant, 226–28, 230, 241
identity foreclosure and, 230, 242
overthinking and, 235n
periodic checkups on, 233–35
rethinking, 228, 230, 242–43
scientist mindset and, 235
“what do you want to be” question and, 225–26, 230, 231, 232
see also life plans
Cassidy, Chris, 205–7
caveats, 173–74, 176, 255
Cavett, Dick, 143
Central Park bird-watching incident, 181–83
challenge networks, 83–84, 200, 218, 253
author’s use of, 86–87, 246
corporate cultures and, 86
Pixar’s use of, 83–84
shared values in, 84n
Wright brothers as, 89–90
Challenger space shuttle disaster, 207
change, continuity and, 31
change talk, in motivational interviewing, 152–53
charged conversations, 163–83
binary bias and, 165, 166
complexification in, 165–66, 167–68, 255
emotions in, 179–83, 179, 255
idea cults and, 176–77
nuance in, 168, 171, 174, 176, 183
perspective-taking vs. perspective-seeking in, 178
productive vs. unproductive, 179–80, 179, 180
scientist mindset in, 183
Chatman, Jennifer, 89
children, see kids
choice, freedom of, 148, 255
climate change, beliefs about:
binary bias and, 169
complexity and, 172–73
desirability bias and, 168
media and, 170–73
preacher mindset and, 168
skepticism vs. denial in, 169
spectrum of, 169–70, 170
in U.S., 167, 168
climate deniers, 169
Clinton, Hillary, in 2016 election, 69, 71
cognitive ability, emotional intelligence vs., 175–76
cognitive flexibility, see mental flexibility
cognitive laziness, 7–8
as barrier to rethinking, 4
Coleman, Peter T., 163–64, 179
collective rethinking, 11, 161–222, 255–57
Columbia space shuttle disaster, 207, 210–11, 220
Columbia University, 163
commitment, escalation of, 229–30
Committee for Skeptical Inquiry, 169–70
common ground, search for, 104–5, 107, 108–9, 254
common identity, 129
competence:
confidence vs., 33–54, 39, 43, 44, 48–49, 49, 252
humility and, 215n
complexification, 199
caveats and contingencies in, 173–74, 176, 255
in charged conversations, 165–67, 255
media and, 171–73
as signal of credibility, 171, 174
conclusions:
author’s view of, 245–46
in fiction, 245
confidence, 46–48
in capacity to learn, 48, 252
competence vs., 33–54, 39, 43, 44, 48–49, 49, 252
humility and, see confident humility
ignorance and, 33, 40–41, 42–46, 43, 44
as measure of faith in self, 46–47, 47, 49, 53
mental blindness and, 41, 45
see also armchair quarterback syndrome; impostor syndrome
confident humility, 46–48, 47, 49, 52–54, 67, 72n, 112, 116–19, 215, 249
in motivational interviewing, 147, 157
confirmation bias, 25, 28, 29, 174n, 252
conflict:
avoidance of, 81–82
constructive, 77–93, 253
as energizing for disagreeable people, 82, 84
in families, 80–81
in low-performing vs. high-performing groups, 78–80, 79
see also relationship conflict; task conflict
conformity, group polarization and, 127–28
confusion, in learning process, 199, 255, 256
constructive conflict, 77–93, 253
contingencies, 174, 176, 255
continuity, change and, 31
Cooper, Christian, 181–82
core values, 55–56
beliefs vs., 64, 66n, 251
coronavirus pandemic, 248, 249
rethinking assumptions in, 9–10
Costanza, George (char.), 68, 118
counterfactual thinking:
beliefs and, 137–39
destabilizing stereotypes with, 134–40
Coutifaris, Constantinos, 213
craft, mastery of, 198
Crane, Frasier (char.), 55
crises, reversion to learned responses in, 5–7
criticism, reception to, 87n
Csikszentmihalyi, Mihaly, 27
Cuomo, Andrew, 249
curiosity, 27–28, 59, 67, 92, 102, 105, 106, 115, 117, 137, 140, 145, 147, 156–59, 165, 174, 180,
188, 197, 199, 200, 203, 211, 214, 221, 251, 255
in motivational interviewing, 147, 157
Dalio, Ray, 63
Darwin, Charles, 33
Davis, Daryl, in encounters with white supremacists, 121–22, 139–41, 151
Davis, Murray, 59
Dear Penn Freshmen (website), 197
debates, 97–119
adversarial approach to, 102–3, 107
brick walls in, 116
confident humility in, 116–17
curiosity in, 117
disagreements reframed as, 91–92
focusing on key points in, 109–11, 254
as negotiations, 104
nuance in, 117
politician mindset, 107–8
preacher mindset, 110
prosecutor mindset, 110
question-based approach in, 112–13
responses to hostility in, 113–16
scientist mindset in, 102–6, 107, 108–9
search for common ground in, 107, 108–9, 254
defend-attack spirals, 105, 109
deniers, skeptics vs., 169
desirability bias, 25, 28, 29, 71, 168, 173, 174n
detachment:
of opinions from identity, 62, 69–70, 76
of past from present sense of self, 62–63, 69, 76, 251
Difficult Conversations Lab, 163–64, 179
disagreeable people:
conflict as energizing for, 82, 84
as good critics, 86–87
task conflict and, 83, 84
task conflict encouraged by, 90
see also pirates
discovery, joy of, 69, 188, 198, 203
Disney, 85
Doctorow, E. L., 242
Dodge, Wagner, 1–2, 5–6, 8, 11
doubt, 4, 28, 30–31, 45, 65, 67, 92, 165, 208, 211, 221, 234, 243, 250
benefits of, 47–49, 52, 54, 80, 250
debilitating effect of, 46–47, 52–53
in rethinking cycles, 27, 45, 67, 83, 92, 112–13, 137, 140, 147, 158, 165, 171, 187, 188, 208,
234, 261
see also confident humility; self-doubt
drafts and revisions, in learning process, 199–203, 256
Duke University, UNC rivalry with, 131
dumbstruck effect, 192
Dunning, David, 38, 40, 44, 158
Dunning-Kruger effect, 38–39, 40–41, 42n, 43, 52, 53, 252
Durant, Kevin, 124n
Dutton, Jane, 242
Earth, as seen from space, 128–29
echo chambers, 61, 164, 252
Edmondson, Amy, 208–9, 217–18
education:
entrenched beliefs in, 17
teaching students to question knowledge, 185–203
see also learning; teachers, teaching
Einstein, Albert, 22
elections, U.S., of 2016, 66–67, 69–71, 70, 71, 164
EL Education, 201–2
emotional intelligence:
cognitive ability vs., 175–76
overestimating, 42
emotions, 24, 59, 63, 69, 75, 78
binary bias in, 180
in charged conversations, 179–83, 179, 255
mixed, 180–81
as works in progress, 180, 255
England, career choices in, 233n
entrepreneurship:
decisiveness as overvalued in, 21–22
scientist mindset and, 20–22, 21, 251
erroneous thinking, 55–76
attachment to, 62
echo chambers and filter bubbles in, 61, 164, 252
joy of acknowledging, 61–62, 65–66, 69, 70, 71–72, 89, 252
escalation of commitment, 229–30
Étienne-Rousseau, Marie-Hélène, 143, 145, 147–48, 155, 158–59
Étienne-Rousseau, Tobie, 143, 145, 147–48, 155
Eversley, Karina, 206
excellence, ethic of, 198, 200
experience, expertise vs., 43–44
experience machine, 194
expertise, experience vs., 43–44
experts, questioning judgment of, 18
Facebook, precursor to, 8
fallibility, acceptance of, 59
feedback, 86, 212–13, 256
Feynman, Richard, 59
fiction, conclusion in, 245
fight-or-flight response, 60
filter bubbles, 61, 164, 252
Floyd, George, 10
forecasting, accuracy of, 65–73
rethinking and, 67–68, 248
forecasting tournaments, 65, 73
Forster, E. M., 158
Fragale, Alison, 131
Gagneur, Arnaud, 148–49, 155, 158–59
Gates, Bill, 212
Gates, Melinda, 212
Mean Reviews video and, 214–15
Gates Foundation, 208
Mean Reviews video at, 214–15
psychological safety at, 212–13, 214–15
Give and Take (Grant), 62n
givers, success rate of, 61, 62n
Goldman, Emma, 245
Goleman, Daniel, 175
Good Judgment, 65
Goodwin, Doris Kearns, 121
Google, 209
Gore, Al, 167, 168–69
Graf, Steffi, 124n
Graham, Paul, 114
Grant, Adam (author):
agreeableness trait of, 81–82, 89
approach to debate, 103–4, 113–15
career choices and, 225–26
challenge network of, 86–87
complexifying conversations, 174–77
family background of, 226
and joy of being wrong, 62, 89
motivational interviewing and, 151–53
online social network and, 8–9
questioning stereotypes, 137–38
as teacher, 195–98
Grant, Ryan, medical career of, 226–28, 230, 241–42
Great Depression, 249
greatness, of composers, 114–15
Greenspan, Stephen, 18, 19
Grindle, Nicole, 88–89
grit, 229–30
group polarization:
conformity and, 128
stereotypes and, 127–28
groups:
contact between, 139
stereotypes and, 139
gun control, 164
habits, 8, 9
cognitive laziness and, 7–8
Handey, Jack, 225
Hansen, Chris, 207, 211
Hansen, Michele, 117–18
happiness, pursuit of, 237–38
environment and, 238–40
meaning vs., 238, 240–41
Hemingway, Ernest, 87, 239
Holocaust deniers, 189–90
Holocaust survivors, 130, 132, 189–90
hostility, responses to, 113–16
hot dog sandwich survey, 125, 125
humility, 27, 45–48, 52–54, 106, 112, 117, 119, 137, 147, 157–58, 165, 200, 214–15, 221, 234,
243, 249–50, 256
competence and, 215n
as groundedness, 46–48
intellectual, see intellectual humility
self-doubt vs., 46
see also confident humility
hypotheses, testing of, 20, 21, 23
Ibarra, Herminia, 235
IBM, Project Debater of, 97–102, 107–10
Iceland, 2008 financial crisis in, 35–36
idea cults, 176–77
identity, see self, sense of
identity foreclosure, 230, 232–33, 234, 242
ideology, see beliefs
ignorance, confidence and, 33, 40–41, 42–46, 43, 44
Ig™ Nobel Prize, 38
impostor syndrome, 36, 37–38, 49–51
armchair quarterback syndrome vs., 51
gender and, 51n
in high achievers, 50
possible benefits of, 50–54
Inconvenient Truth, An (film), 167
Incredibles, The (film), 83, 84, 87–88
influencing, defense mechanisms against, 154–55, 154
influencing, listening and, 155–60
information, see knowledge
instincts, 8, 9
integrity, passion as sign of, 179
intellectual humility, 27–28, 31, 45–48, 52–54, 62, 102, 106, 112, 117, 119, 137, 147, 157–58,
165, 187, 200, 203, 214–15, 221, 249–50, 253
arrogance vs., 45
International Space Station, 205–7
internet:
misinformation on, 164
simplification and, 171
interpersonal rethinking, 10–11, 95–160, 253–55
interviewing, motivational, see motivational interviewing
iPhone, 23
Jobs’s resistance to, 29–31
iPod, 30
IQ scores:
emotional intelligence and, 175
mental flexibility vs., 24–27
stereotyping and, 24–25
Israel-Palestine conflict, 131
stereotyping in, 130
Jeff (biotech CEO), 151–53, 155
Jehn, Karen “Etty,” 78
Jimmy Kimmel Live! (TV show), 214
Jobs, Steve, iPhone resisted by, 29–31
Johnson Space Center, 221
joy of being wrong, 61–62, 65–66, 69, 70, 71–72, 89, 252
judging, of self vs. work, 201
Kaczynski, Ted, 60, 74–75
Kahneman, Daniel:
and joy of being wrong, 61–62
scientist mindset of, 62
Kelemen, Deborah, 188–89
Kelly, George, 127
Kelman, Herb, 130, 131
Kendi, Ibram X., 182
kids:
encouraging rethinking by, 256; see also teachers, teaching
unlearning and, 189–90, 256
“what do you want to be” question and, 225–26, 230, 231, 232
knowledge:
exponential expansion of, 17
oral transmission of, 247
overconfidence and, 92–93
of what we don’t know, see intellectual humility
Knowlton, Karren, 130–31
Kolbert, Elizabeth, 60
Kony, Joseph, 157
Bigombe’s meetings with, 155–56
Kreider, Tim, 97
Kruger, Justin, 38, 158
Krumrei Mancuso, Elizabeth, 52
Ku Klux Klan, 121–22, 139–41, 151
Kundro, Tim, 126, 129–30, 131, 133
Lazaridis, Mike, 31
in failure to rethink marketplace, 23–24
as science prodigy, 15–16, 23
as smartphone pioneer, 16, 23
as victim of overconfidence cycle, 29
leaders, rethinking by, 248–50
learning:
capacity for, confidence in, 48, 252
challenge networks in, 200
confusion in, 199, 255, 256
inquiry-based, see active learning
scientist mindset in, 186
textbooks and, 185–87
see also lifelong learning
learning cultures:
“how do you know” questions in, 211–12
in organizations, 205–22, 256–57
performance cultures vs., 209
psychological safety in, 209, 212–13, 214–15, 256
rethinking in, 207–8
rethinking scorecards in, 218–19, 218, 257
lectures, active learning vs., 190–93, 196
Lewis, Jerry Lee, 121
lifelong learning, 11, 54, 251, 253
charged conversations in, 163–83
focus on results as obstacle to, 217
teachers and, 185–203
at workplace, 205–22
life plans, 225–43
identity foreclosure and, 232–33
periodic checkups on, 235–37, 257
rethinking, 233, 235–37, 257
tunnel vision and, 228–29
see also career choices
listening, 143–59
as expression of respect and care, 159–60
influencing and, 155–60
in motivational interviewing, 153
persuasive, 253
reflective, 147
listening circles, 157–58
logic, faulty, prosecutor mindset, 102, 104
Lord’s Resistance Army, 155, 156n, 157
Lyne, Andrew, 73
McCann, Lauren, 196–97
McCarthy, Erin, 185–87, 189–90, 203
Maclean, Norman, 5
Madoff, Bernie, 18, 19
managers:
feedback and, 213–14
self-rating of, 39–40, 39
Mann Gulch wildfire, 1–2, 5–7
outmoded assumptions as factor in, 11–12
mastery, 198
Matrix, The (film), 194
meaning, pursuit of, happiness vs., 238, 240–41
Mean Reviews videos, 214–15
“Mean Tweets,” 214
measles, 148
mortality rate of, 144
resurgence of, 143–44
media:
climate change and, 170–73
complexification and, 171–73
medical errors, psychological safety and, 208–9
mental flexibility, 2–3, 8, 9–10, 251
IQ scores vs., 24–27
rethinking and, see rethinking
scientist mindset and, 27
Mercz, Ursula, 33–34
Michigan, University of, 132
Mill, John Stuart, 241
Miller, Bill, 146, 152, 153, 154, 156
misfits, see disagreeable people; pirates
Mitchell, Edgar, 128
Morrell, Kjirste, forecasting skill of, 68–69
motivation:
ineffective approaches in, 150
pay and, 114
motivational interviewing, 146–51
in business, 151–53
confident humility in, 147
curiosity in, 147, 157
in everyday life, 149–51
freedom of choice in, 148, 255
listening in, 153
open-ended questions in, 147, 148, 156
resisting righting reflex in, 156
summarizing in, 153
sustain talk vs. change talk in, 152–53
as tool for changing behavior, 148
Mount Stupid, 43, 44, 45, 252
Moyers, Theresa, 152
Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus, 114–15
Murphy, Kate, 156
Murray, Henry:
beliefs experiment of, 55–57, 60, 74–75
spy assessment test of, 56
NASA:
emerging learning culture at, 221
lack of psychological safety at, 210–11
overconfidence cycles at, 208
and Parmitano’s spacesuit malfunction, 205–7, 211
performance culture at, 207–8, 210–11, 216–17
rethinking failures at, 207–8, 217, 222
space shuttle disasters of, 207, 210–11, 220
Natarajan, Harish:
debate championships of, 97
question-based approach of, 112
in school subsidy debate, 97–103, 106–10, 112
negotiations, 106
adversarial approach vs. search for common ground in, 104–5
asking questions in, 105–6
debates as, 104
focusing on key points in, 105
humility and curiosity in, 105–6
networks, challenge, see challenge networks
New York Times, 248–49
New York Yankees, Red Sox rivalry with, 122–24, 126–27, 127, 128, 133–36
Nomad Health, 241
North Carolina, University of, Duke rivalry with, 131
Nozick, Robert, 194–95
nuance, 117, 168, 171, 174, 176, 183
Obama, Michelle, 230
Ochoa, Ellen, 217, 220–21
and Columbia space shuttle disaster, 210–11
Oddsson, Davíð:
in campaign for Iceland’s presidency, 37, 41, 54
career of, 41
and 2008 financial crisis, 36–37, 45
Office, The (TV show), 117–18
Office of Strategic Services, 56
Ohio State University, 132–33
open systems, 241
identities as, 243
opinions, see beliefs and opinions
Originals (Grant), 116
overconfidence, 92–93
overconfidence cycles, 28–29, 28, 61, 165, 188, 189, 208, 233, 252
overthinking, 235n
overview effect, in astronauts, 128–29
Parmitano, Luca, in spacesuit malfunction, 205–7, 211
passion, as sign of integrity, 178
passion talks, 198
pay, motivation and, 114
perfectionists, rethinking as difficult for, 195–96
performance cultures, 207–8, 221
best practices and, 216–17
learning cultures vs., 209
persuasion, beliefs as reinforced by failed attempts at, 144–45, 146
persuasive listening, 253
Peterson, Jordan, 175
pirates (misfits), 83, 84–85, 88–89
Pixar, 82–83
pirates at, 83, 84–85, 88–89
Planck, Max, 247
Plutarch, 132
polarization, political, 164
polarizing issues, conversations on, see charged conversations
police brutality, rethinking assumptions about, 10
politician mindset, 233, 248, 260
in collective rethinking, 163, 169, 183
in individual rethinking, 18–19, 21, 22, 22, 25, 27, 28, 29, 53, 62, 80, 85–86, 88
in interpersonal rethinking, 107, 108, 145, 156
preacher mindset, 233, 248, 251
in collective rethinking, 165, 167, 169, 175, 177, 183, 192, 200, 216
in individual rethinking, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 22, 25, 27, 28, 29, 39, 60, 62, 76, 80, 91, 92
in interpersonal rethinking, 102, 104, 107, 108, 110, 111, 117n, 119, 124, 127, 132, 141, 144,
145, 146, 155, 156, 157
Prectet, Debra Jo, see Project Debater
prejudice, 121–41
conversation as antidote to, 140–41
see also rivalries; stereotypes
preschool subsidies, debate on, 97–102, 106–10, 112
presidents, U.S., intellectual curiosity and, 27
process accountability, best practices vs., 216–19, 256
Project Debater, in school subsidy debate, 97–102, 107–10, 112
proof, as enemy of progress, 219
prosecutor mindset, 230, 233, 248, 251
in collective rethinking, 165, 167, 169, 175, 177, 183, 192, 200
in individual rethinking, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 22, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29, 39, 53, 60, 62, 76, 80,
91, 92
in interpersonal rethinking, 102, 104, 107, 108, 110, 111, 113, 119, 124, 127, 132, 141, 145,
146, 155, 156, 157
psychological safety, 208–9, 210, 256
author’s experiments on, 212–13
at Gates Foundation, 212–13, 214–15
“how do you know” question and, 211–12
as lacking at NASA, 210–11
medical errors and, 208–9
process accountability and, 217–18
Quakers, clearness committees and, 156n
question-based approach:
in debates, 112–13
encouraging rethinking through, 253–54
in scientist mindset, 25–26
questions:
counterfactual, 137–39, 254
as encouraged by self-doubt, 53–54
“how do you know,” 211–12
“how” vs. “why,” 254
open-ended, 147, 148, 156
skilled negotiators’ use of, 105–6
“what do you want to be,” 225–26, 230, 231, 232
racial injustice, rethinking assumptions about, 10
racism, 10, 121–22, 139–41, 181–83
Rackham, Neil, 104, 105
Rawls, John, 178
reasoning, flawed:
prosecuting, 110, 111
prosecutor mindset, 21, 22, 22, 60, 76, 80, 91, 92
reflective listening, 147
relationship conflict, 78–80, 79
as barrier to rethinking, 80
task conflict and, 90, 91–93
relationships, rethinking in, 236–37
rethinking, 3–4
encouraging others to adopt, see interpersonal rethinking
in individuals, see individual rethinking
in lifelong learning, see collective rethinking
making time for, 257
as mindset, 16
negative responses to, 30
process of, 246–50
see also unlearning
rethinking cycle, 27, 28, 28, 45, 67, 83, 92, 112–13, 137, 140, 147, 158, 165, 171, 187, 188,
208, 234, 261
rethinking scorecards, 218–19, 218, 257
revisions and drafts, in learning process, 199–203, 256
righting reflex, 156
Ripley, Amanda, 163, 165
rituals, sports rivalries as, 133
rivalries:
animosity in, 124–25
in business, 124
group polarization in, 128
humanizing the other side in, 130–31
in sports, see sports rivalries
see also prejudice; stereotypes
Rock, Chris, 230
Rollnick, Stephen, 146, 152, 153, 154, 156
Roosevelt, Franklin D., trial-and-error method of, 248–50
Sandler, Adam, 238–39
Saturday Night Live (TV show), 238–39
Schulz, Kathryn, 67
science:
peer-review process in, 86
unlearning in, 188–90
scientific method, 20, 199, 247–48
skepticism in, 169–70
“scientist,” coining of term, 247
scientist mindset, 23, 53, 62, 66–67, 74, 76, 92, 93, 116, 145, 186, 249–50
as actively questioning beliefs and assumptions, 25–26
author’s adoption of, 26–27
career change and, 235
caveats and contingencies in, 173–74, 176, 255
in charged conversations, 183
and consistent narrative vs. accurate record, 174–75
in debates, 102–6
entrepreneurs and, 20–22, 21, 251
humility as characteristic of, 28
rethinking as central to, 19–20, 247–48, 251
Scotland, career choices in, 233n
Scott, Michael (char.), 118
second opinions, 18
Seinfeld, Jerry, 133
Seinfeld (TV show), 68, 118
Seles, Monica, 124n
self, sense of, 8, 9, 12
commonality in, 129
detaching beliefs and opinions from, 62, 63–64, 69–70, 76, 251–52
identity foreclosure and, 230
as open system, 243
present vs. past, 62–63, 69, 76, 251
rethinking as challenge to, 4, 7, 42
tribes and, 125–26
self-awareness, 39, 48
self-deprecation:
gender and, 72n
self-confidence and, 72
self-doubt:
asking questions as encouraged by, 53–54
benefits of, 49–54, 252
humility vs., 46
see also impostor syndrome
self-esteem, evolution of, 241
Seneca, 35
sexism, 10
Shandell, Marissa, 234–35
Shaw, George Bernard, 15
Silver, Nate, 66
simplification:
internet and, 171
media and, 171
resistance to, see complexification
skepticism, in scientific method, 169–70
skeptics, deniers vs., 169
smartphone revolution, 16, 22, 23, 31
Smith, Will, 73
social networks, polarizing issues and, 164–65
space, Earth as seen from, 128–29
sports, stock market influence of, 126
sports rivalries, 122–28
author’s experiments on, 131–32, 133–36
group polarization in, 128
as rituals, 133
stereotyping in, 127
status quo bias, 194n
stereotypes, 121–41
animosity and, 127
as barrier to rethinking, 124
conversation as antidote to, 140–41
group polarization and, 127–28
groups and, 139
of groups vs. individuals, 131
intergroup contact and, 139
in Israel-Palestine conflict, 130
racist, 121–22, 139–41
rethinking timeline for, 135
shaky foundations of, 139
in sports rivalries, 127
tribes and, 136n
see also prejudice; rivalries
stereotypes, arbitrariness of, 133–34
counterfactual thinking as destabilizing, 134–40
stereotyping, IQ scores and, 24–25
stock market, influence of sports matches on, 126
Storm King Mountain wildfire, 6–7
stress:
learned responses to, 5–7
Murray’s experiment on, 55–58, 60, 74
Strohminger, Nina, 40n
summarizing, in motivational interviewing, 153
task conflict, 78–80, 79
disagreeable people and, 83, 84
as encouraged by disagreeable people, 90
encouragement of, 88
politician mindset and, 85–86
relationship conflict and, 90, 91–93
rethinking as fostered by, 80, 253
Taylor, Breonna, 10
teachers, teaching:
Berger as, 198–203
Grant as, 195–98
lecturing vs. active learning in, 190–93, 196
lifelong learning and, 185–203
McCarthy as, 185–87, 189–90, 203
Nozick as, 194–95
textbooks and, 185–87
unlearning and, 188–90
technology, exponential expansion of, 17
TED talks, 192, 195, 196
teenagers, see kids
test-taking, rethinking and, 3–4
Tetlock, Phil, 18, 67
Tewfik, Basima, 50, 51n
textbooks, 185–87
Theseus paradox, 132–33
Time, 36–37
Tómasdóttir, Halla, 35–36
in campaign for Iceland’s presidency, 36, 49, 53–54
impostor syndrome and, 36, 38, 49, 52–54
totalitarian ego, 59–61, 73, 74
Toy Story (film), 82
tribes:
identity and, 126
stereotyping and, 136n
Trump, Donald, in 2016 election, 66–67, 69–71, 70, 71
tunnel vision, 235n
life choices and, 228–29
Tussing, Danielle, 52
2008 financial crisis, 35–36, 45
Uganda, civil strife in, 155–57, 159
uncertainty, 53
unlearning, 2, 12, 188–90
kids and, 189–90, 256
in stress situations, 5–7
see also rethinking
Urban, Tim, 45
vaccination:
autism mistakenly linked to, 144, 158–59
unfounded fear of, 143–44
vaccine whisperers, 145–49, 158–59
Voldemort (char.), 146–47
Vonnegut, Kurt, 205
Wales, career choices in, 233n
Walker, Candice, 242–43
Walker, John, 87–88, 89
Weick, Karl, 7
Wharton School, 9
Mean Reviews video at, 214
“what do you want to be” question, 225–26, 230, 231, 232
WhatsApp, 24
white supremacists, Davis’s encounters with, 121–22, 139–41, 151
Whitman, Walt, 165
Wilde, Oscar, 77
wildfires, firefighters’ behavior in, 1–2, 5–7
workplace:
best practices in, 216–17
grades as poor predictor of performance in, 195
learning cultures at, 205–22
psychological safety and, see psychological safety
World War II, 56
Wright, Katharine, 91
Wright, Wilbur and Orville, 77, 81
as built-in challenge network, 89–90
in conflict over propeller, 91–93
Wrzesniewski, Amy, 242
X (company), 86
Young Men and Fire (Maclean), 5
Zuckerberg, Mark, 8
ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
ADAM GRANT is an organizational psychologist at Wharton, where
he has been the top-rated professor for seven straight years. He is
one of TED's most popular speakers, his books have sold millions of
copies, his talks have been viewed more than 25 million times, and
his podcast WorkLife with Adam Grant has topped the charts. His
pioneering research has inspired people to rethink fundamental
assumptions about motivation, generosity, and creativity. He has
been recognized as one of the world's 10 most influential
management thinkers and Fortune's 40 under 40, and has received
distinguished scientific achievement awards from the American
Psychological Association and the National Science Foundation.
Adam received his B.A. from Harvard and his Ph.D. from the
University of Michigan, and he is a former Junior Olympic
springboard diver. He lives in Philadelphia with his wife and their
three children.
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* In an analysis of over 40 million tweets, Americans were more likely than Canadians to
use words like sh*t, b*tch, hate, and damn, while Canadians favored more agreeable words
like thanks, great, good, and sure.
* In building a team, there are some dimensions where fit is important and others where
misfit adds value. Research suggests that we want people with dissimilar traits and
backgrounds but similar principles. Diversity of personality and experience brings fresh
ideas for rethinking and complementary skills for new ways of doing. Shared values
promote commitment and collaboration.
* How well we take criticism can depend as much on our relationship with the messenger as
it does on the message. In one experiment, people were at least 40 percent more receptive to
criticism after they were told “I’m giving you these comments because I have very high
expectations and I know that you can reach them.” It’s surprisingly easy to hear a hard truth
when it comes from someone who believes in your potential and cares about your success.
* Pay isn’t a carrot we need to dangle to motivate people—it’s a symbol of how much we
value them. Managers can motivate people by designing meaningful jobs in which people
have freedom, mastery, belonging, and impact. They can show appreciation by paying
people well.
* In a meta-analysis of persuasion attempts, two-sided messages were more convincing than
one-sided messages—as long as people refuted the main point of the other side. If they just
presented both sides without taking a stance, they were less persuasive than if they preached
only their side.
* When Monica Seles was stabbed on a tennis court in 1993, I know at least one Steffi Graf
fan who celebrated. In the 2019 NBA finals, when Kevin Durant went down with an injury,
some Toronto Raptors fans started cheering, proving that even Canadians are capable of
cruelty. One sports radio host argued, “There is not a single fan in professional sports who
isn’t happy when an opposing big-time player gets injured and in theory will make your
team’s path to success easier.” With all due respect, if you care more about whether your
team wins a game than whether a human being is hurt in real life, you might be a sociopath.
* The stock market impact of soccer losses is the subject of extensive debate: although a
number of studies have demonstrated the effect, others have failed to support it. My hunch
is that it’s more likely to occur in countries where the sport is most popular, the team is
expected to win, the match is high stakes, and the loss is a near miss. Regardless of how
sports influence markets, we know they can affect moods. One study of European military
officers showed that when their favorite soccer team loses on Sunday, they’re less engaged at
work on Monday—and their performance might suffer as a result.
* This isn’t to say that stereotypes never have a basis in reality. Psychologists find that when
comparing groups, many stereotypes match up with the average in a group, but that doesn’t
mean they’re useful for understanding individual members of the group. Thousands of years
ago, when it was rare to interact with different groups, beliefs about the tendencies of
different tribes might have helped our ancestors protect their own tribe. Yet today, when
intergroup interactions are so common, assumptions about a group no longer have the same
utility: it’s much more helpful to learn something about individuals. The same psychologists
have shown that our stereotypes become consistently and increasingly inaccurate when
we’re in conflict with another group—and when we’re judging the ideologies of groups that
are very different from our own. When a stereotype spills over into prejudice, it’s a clue that
it might be time to think again.
* Psychologists have actually studied this recently and found that the arbitrary names of
zodiac signs can give rise to stereotypes and discrimination. Virgo was translated into
Chinese as “virgin,” which calls to mind prejudice against old virgins—spinsters—as critical,
germophobic, fussy, and picky.
* It seems that humans have understood the magic of talking ourselves into change for
thousands of years. I learned recently that the word abracadabra comes from a Hebrew
phrase that means “I create as I speak.”
* The peace talks fell apart when the Ugandan president disregarded Betty’s request to set
the ground rules for the peace talks and instead publicly threatened Kony, who retaliated by
massacring several hundred people in Atiak. Devastated, Betty left and went to work for the
World Bank. A decade later, she initiated another round of peace talks with the rebels. She
returned to Uganda as the chief mediator, spending her own money instead of accepting
funds from the government so she could work independently. She was on the verge of
success when Kony backed out at the last minute. Today, his rebel army has shrunk to a
fraction of its original size and is no longer considered a major threat.
* Quaker retreats have “clearness committees” that serve this very purpose, posing
questions to help people crystallize their thinking and resolve their dilemmas.
* When media headlines proclaim a divided America on gun laws, they’re missing a lot of
complexity. Yes, there’s a gap of 47 to 50 percentage points between Republicans and
Democrats on support for banning and buying back assault weapons. Yet polls show
bipartisan consensus on required background checks (supported by 83 percent of
Republicans and 96 percent of Democrats) and mental health screenings (favored by 81
percent of Republicans and 94 percent of Democrats).
* Climatologists go further, noting that within denial there are at least six different
categories: arguing that (1) CO2 is not increasing; (2) even if CO2 is increasing, warming is
not happening; (3) even if warming is happening, it’s due to natural causes; (4) even if
humans are causing warming, the impact is minimal; (5) even if the human impact is not
trivial, it will be beneficial; and (6) before the situation becomes truly dire, we’ll adapt or
solve it. Experiments suggest that giving science deniers a public platform can backfire by
spreading false beliefs, but rebutting their arguments or their techniques can help.
* When reporters and activists discuss the consequences of climate change, complexity is
often lacking there as well. The gloom-and-doom message can create a burning platform for
those who fear a burning planet. But research across twenty-four countries suggests that
people are more motivated to act and advocate when they see the collective benefits of doing
so—like economic and scientific advancement and building a more moral and caring
community. People across the spectrum of climate skepticism, from alarmed to doubtful,
are more determined to take initiative when they believe it would produce identifiable
benefits. And instead of just appealing to stereotypical liberal values like compassion and
justice, research suggests that journalists can spur more action by emphasizing crosscutting
values like defending freedom as well as more conservative values like preserving the purity
of nature or protecting the planet as an act of patriotism.
* Even when we try to convey nuance, sometimes the message gets lost in translation.
Recently some colleagues and I published an article titled “The Mixed Effects of Online
Diversity Training.” I thought we were making it abundantly clear that our research revealed
how complicated diversity training is, but soon various commentators were heralding it as
evidence supporting the value of diversity training—and a similar number were holding it up
as evidence that diversity training is a waste of time. Confirmation bias and desirability bias
are alive and well.
* Some experiments show that when people embrace paradoxes and contradictions—rather
than avoid them—they generate more creative ideas and solutions. But other experiments
show that when people embrace paradoxes and contradictions, they’re more likely to persist
with wrong beliefs and failing actions. Let that paradox marinate for a while.
* It turns out that younger Anglo Americans are more likely than their older or Asian
American counterparts to reject mixed emotions, like feeling happy and sad at the same
time. The difference seems to lie in comfort accepting dualities and paradoxes. I think it
might help if we had richer language to capture ambivalent emotions. For example,
Japanese gives us koi no yokan, the feeling that it wasn’t love at first sight but we could
grow to love the person over time. The Inuit have iktsuarpok, the mix of anticipation and
anxiety when we’re awaiting the arrival of a guest at our house. Georgians have
shemomedjamo, the feeling of being completely full but eating anyway because the meal is
so good. My favorite emotion word is German: kummerspeck, the extra weight we gain from
emotional overeating when we’re sad. The literal translation of that one: “grief bacon.” I can
see that coming in handy in charged conversations: I didn’t mean to insult you. I’m just
working through some grief bacon right now.
* There’s evidence that middle schoolers score higher on math and science competency tests
when teachers dedicate more time to lecturing than active learning. It remains to be seen
whether lectures are more effective with younger students or whether the gap is driven by
the ineffective implementation of active-learning methods.
* Nozick predicted that most of us would ditch the machine because we value doing and
being—not just experiencing—and because we wouldn’t want to limit our experiences to
what humans could imagine and simulate. Later philosophers argued that if we did reject
the machine, it might not be for those reasons but due to status quo bias: we would have to
walk away from reality as we know it. To investigate that possibility, they changed the
premise and ran an experiment. Imagine that you wake up one day to learn that your whole
life has been an experience machine that you chose years earlier, and you now get to choose
whether to unplug or plug back in. In that scenario, 46 percent of people said they wanted to
plug back in. If they were told that unplugging would take them back to “real life” as a
multimillionaire artist based in Monaco, 50 percent of people still wanted to plug back in. It
seems that many people would rather not abandon a familiar virtual reality for an
unfamiliar actual reality—or maybe some have a distaste for art, wealth, and sovereign
principalities.
* Sharing our imperfections can be risky if we haven’t yet established our competence. In
studies of lawyers and teachers searching for jobs, expressing themselves authentically
increased the odds of getting job offers if they were rated in the 90th percentile or above in
competence, but backfired if they were less competent. Lawyers at or below the 50th
percentile in competence—and teachers at or below the 25th—actually did worse when they
were candid. Experiments show that people who haven’t yet proven their competence are
respected less if they admit their weaknesses. They aren’t just incompetent; they seem
insecure, too.
* I have another objection to this question: it encourages kids to make work the main event
of their identities. When you’re asked what you want to be, the only socially acceptable
response is a job. Adults are waiting for kids to wax poetic about becoming something grand
like an astronaut, heroic like a firefighter, or inspired like a filmmaker. There’s no room to
say you just want job security, let alone that you hope to be a good father or a great mother—
or a caring and curious person. Although I study work for a living, I don’t think it should
define us.
* There’s evidence that graduates of universities in England and Wales were more likely to
change career paths than those who studied in Scotland. It isn’t a culture effect—it’s a timing
effect. In England and Wales, students had to start specializing in high school, which limited
their options for exploring alternatives throughout college. In Scotland, students weren’t
allowed to specialize until their third year of college, which gave them more opportunities to
rethink their plans and develop new interests. They ended up being more likely to major in
subjects that weren’t covered in high school—and more likely to find a match.
* I originally recommended career checkups for students to avoid tunnel vision, but I’ve
learned that they can also be useful for students at the opposite end of the rethinking
spectrum: overthinkers. They often report back that when they’re dissatisfied at work,
knowing a reminder will pop up twice a year helps them resist the temptation to think about
quitting every day.
* I think the absurdity was best captured by humorist Richard Brautigan: “Expressing a
human need, I always wanted to write a book that ended with the word Mayonnaise.” He
wrote that line in the penultimate chapter of a book, and delightfully went on to end the
book with the word—but deliberately misspelled it “mayonaise” to deprive the reader of
closure. Human need, unfulfilled.
* Had thought earlier about showing my edits throughout the book, but didn’t want to inflict
that on you. Slogging through half-baked ideas and falsified hypotheses wouldn’t be the best
use of your time. Even if you’re a huge fan of Hamilton, you probably wouldn’t love the first
draft—it’s much more exciting to engage with the product of rethinking than the process.
* Too whimsical. Early readers want more gravitas here—several have reported that they’re
handling dissent differently now. When they confront information that challenges their
opinions, instead of rejecting it or begrudgingly engaging with it, they’re taking it as an
opportunity to learn something new: “Maybe I should rethink that!”
* Challenge network says updating a “fun fact” from the book is too trivial.
* A big unanswered question here is when rethinking should end—where should we draw
the line? I think the answer is different for every person in every situation, but my sense is
that most of us are operating too far to the left of the curve. The most relevant data I’ve seen
were in chapter 3 on superforecasters: they updated their predictions an average of four
times per question instead of twice per question. This suggests that it doesn’t take much
rethinking to benefit from it, and the downsides are minimal. Rethinking doesn’t always
have to change our minds. Like students rethinking their answers on tests, even if we decide
not to pivot on a belief or a decision, we still come away knowing we’ve reflected more
thoughtfully.
* For my part, I had assumed the phrase “blowing smoke up your arse” came from people
gifting cigars to someone they wanted to impress, so you can imagine how intrigued I was
when my wife told me its real origin: In the 1700s, it was common practice to revive
drowning victims with tobacco enemas, literally blowing smoke up their behinds. Only later
did they learn that it was toxic to the cardiac system.
* I started not with answers but with questions about rethinking. Then I went looking for
the best evidence available from randomized, controlled experiments and systematic field
studies. Where the evidence didn’t exist, I launched my own research projects. Only when I
had reached a data-driven insight did I search for stories to illustrate and illuminate the
studies. In an ideal world, every insight would come from a meta-analysis—a study of
studies, where researchers cumulate the patterns across a whole body of evidence, adjusting
for the quality of each data point. Where those aren’t available, I’ve highlighted studies that
I find rigorous, representative, or thought provoking. Sometimes I’ll include details on the
methods—not only so you can understand how the researchers formed their conclusions,
but to offer a window into how scientists think. In many places, I’ll summarize the results
without going into depth on the studies themselves, under the assumption that you’re
reading to rethink like a scientist—not to become one. That said, if you felt a jolt of
excitement at the mention of a meta-analysis, it might be time to (re)consider a career in
social science.
* This looks like good news for countries like the United States, where self-assessments
came fairly close to reality, but that doesn’t hold across domains. In a recent study, Englishspeaking teenagers around the world were asked to rate their knowledge in sixteen different
areas of math. Three of the subjects listed were entirely fake—declarative fractions, proper
numbers, and subjunctive scaling—which made it possible to track who would claim
knowledge about fictional topics. On average, the worst offenders were North American,
male, and wealthy.
* My favorite example comes from Nina Strohminger, who once lamented: “My dad called
this morning to tell me about the Dunning-Kruger effect, not realizing that his daughter
with a Ph.D. in psychology would certainly know the Dunning-Kruger effect, thereby giving
a tidy demonstration of the Dunning-Kruger effect.”
* There’s an ongoing debate about the role of statistical measurement issues in the
Dunning-Kruger effect, but the controversy is mostly around how strong the effect is and
when it occurs—not whether it’s real. Interestingly, even when people are motivated to
accurately judge their knowledge, the least knowledgeable often struggle the most. After
people take a logical reasoning test, when they’re offered a $100 bill if they can correctly
(and, therefore, humbly) guess how many questions they got right, they still end up being
overconfident. On a twenty-question test, they think they got an average of 1.42 more
questions right than they actually did—and the worst performers are the most
overconfident.
* That reaction can vary based on gender. In Basima’s study of investment professionals,
impostor thoughts helped the task performance of both men and women, but were more
likely to spur extra teamwork among men. Men were driven to compensate for their fear
that they might fall short of expectations in their core tasks by doing extra collaborative
work. Women were more dependent on confidence and more likely to feel debilitated by
doubts.
* I was studying the factors that explain why some writers and editors performed better
than others at a travel guide company where I was working. Performance wasn’t related to
their sense of autonomy, control, confidence, challenge, connection, collaboration, conflict,
support, self-worth, stress, feedback, role clarity, or enjoyment. The best performers were
the ones who started their jobs believing that their work would have a positive impact on
others. That led me to predict that givers would be more successful than takers, because
they would be energized by the difference their actions made in others’ lives. I went on to
test and support that hypothesis in a number of studies, but then I came across other
studies in which generosity predicted lower productivity and higher burnout. Instead of
trying to prove them wrong, I realized I was wrong—my understanding was incomplete. I set
out to explore when givers succeed and when they fail, and that became my first book, Give
and Take.
* It’s possible to change even your deep-seated beliefs while keeping your values intact.
Psychologists recently compared people who walked away from their religions with those
who were currently religious and never religious. Across Hong Kong, the Netherlands, New
Zealand, and the United States, they found a religious residue effect: people who deidentified with religion were just as likely to keep volunteering, and gave more money to
charity than those who were never religious.
* If you choose to make fun of yourself out loud, there’s evidence that how people react
depends on your gender. When men make self-deprecating jokes, they’re seen as more
capable leaders, but when women do it, they’re judged as less capable. Apparently, many
people have missed the memo that if a woman pokes fun at herself, it’s not a reflection of
incompetence or inadequacy. It’s a symbol of confident humility and wit.